Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Charles J. Stephens

Description: What can Grace mean in the shadow of fear and destruction? What can Grace mean within a liberal religious community where reason and science temper our understanding of that which we call Holy? Is it not present when we sense that there is a space or a place where we are accepted and belong?  

Opening Words: “Look To This Day” attributed to Kalidasa #419

First Reading: The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

Man at his best, like water,
Serves as he goes along:
Like water he seeks his own level,
The common level of life,
Loves living close to the earth,
Living clear down in his heart,
Loves kinship with his neighbors,
The pick of words that tell the truth,
The even tenor of a well-run state,
The fair profit of able dealing,
The right timing of useful deeds,
And for blocking no one’s way
No one blames him.

Spoken Reflection: from Denise Levertov #479

Second Reading: Paul Tillich [Shaking the Foundations ET p.163]

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life ,which we loved, or from which we are estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that. moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying:

‘You, are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything simply accept the fact that you are accepted’

“What is Grace to a Unitarian Universalist?”
Preaching about Grace during the death and destruction going on in Syria and so many other areas may seem presumptuous. I can’t help but wonder, what would I say about Grace if I were struggling to stay alive as a Syrian or as a volunteer for the “Drs. Without Boarders” efforts being made to save lives in the midst of hospitals being bombed.

And yet, within our lives, we have all experienced moments when we are tempted to use the word grace (or some other word) to describe how we feel.

The word grace has come down to us through Middle English, the Anglo-French, and the Latin word gratia which means favor, charm, thanks and gratus. Its original meaning being something pleasing for which one feels grateful. This is all related to the Sanskrit word gṛṇāti or he praises.

Amidst all the death, destruction and horror that pervades and often dominates our world, grace remains.   “There but for the grace of God go I” is a variant of what John Bradford, a religious prisoner in the Tower of London said when he saw a group of fellow prisoners being led out to their execution. He felt that way even though he too was eventually led to his execution.

The traditional meaning of Grace within Christianity that I was taught in Church and in Seminary was concerned with God receiving us, forgiving our sins and redeeming us through the death of his son Jesus on the cross. During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther taught that Grace cannot in any way be obtained by a person or sold as the church was doing in his day and called Indulgences. Luther taught that Grace is freely given by God to the most deserving and to the most undeserving like rain falling on both the just and the unjust.

My Merriam dictionary clearly reflects this traditional Christian meaning of Grace: the “unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification.

But this understanding of God’s grace coming to me because of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross is something that never spoke to me, not as a child in Sunday School nor as a student in seminary. I struggled with what it meant then and as a religious liberal I have wondered over the years, what am I, to do with the religious term, GRACE?

What makes it more difficult for me, is that in my life, I have experienced moments when I would say I felt grace. Small ways when I did something stupid while driving and suddenly realized, after a near miss, that I could have been in a terrible accident but wasn’t. And there were those times when I observed the beauty of a sunrise while in the midst of chemo therapy. And there have been the thousands of times that I have been stopped in my tracks by breathtaking views of a marvelous panorama or a tiny intricate flower or insect. And there have been moments of human warm, compassion or intimacy that were so powerful that I was left speechless. But these moments of grace weren’t an experience of grace in the traditional way that I had expected to understand it.

How about you? Have you ever experienced something like these moments that you would identify as grace?

Maybe you were struck by grace when you were in great pain and restlessness. Maybe you were struck by grace when walking through the dark valley when you felt your life was empty. Maybe you were struck by grace when you felt let down by your own indifference, weakness, hostility, or lack of direction.

Has grace ever struck you in the context of what I read to you earlier from Paul Tillich? He wrote that Grace, “…strikes us when, year after year, the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.   Sometimes at that moment a wave of light can break into our darkness, and it really is as though a voice were saying:

‘You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything simply accept the fact that you are accepted’          Paul Tillich [Shaking the Foundations ET p.163]

Grace is feeling accepted. Grace is having the deep and strong feeling that you are OK and have a place in the universe, no matter how small that place may be. Grace is feeling accepted just as you are by something grater than your individual life. This need not be a personal god or even an impersonal god for that matter. And this definition of grace does not exist because someone’s life was sacrificed for us. And best of all, we don’t even need to wrestle with what that something is or isn’t. We do not need to try to do anything about it, nothing more than simply accepting the fact that we are accepted. We don’t even need to think of it as being accepted, that may be way too anthropomorphic for some of us. Grace is experiencing the joy of being alive in the here and now. Grace is – being present in the here and now, alive and conscious of being alive and in relation to the larger interconnected web of life.

I was talking with a theology professor not too long ago and when he found out that I had graduated from Luther College, he mentioned that Loyal Rue, a very well thought of Religious Naturalist Theologian had taught there . I looked up some of Loyal Rue’s articles and realized how much things, even religious institutions can change in 45 years.

Loyal Rue’s wrote: “The Epic of Evolution counts out for us a pageant of blessings that stupefies the imagination.  Consider the astonishing improbability of a universe suitable for human habitation.  The chaotic events of the Primordial Flaring Forth left our universe with a slight excess of particles over anti-particles (there is a very sound theory that anti-particles – where the electric charge is reversed with a nucleus of antiprotons and anti neutrons are surrounded by positrons, but I won’t get into that now). But, the important point is that if this delicate imbalance had varied by a factor as small as one part in a billion, then we would not be here.   That is grace!

This scientific way of explaining Grace makes sense to me.   With a religious naturalist’s concept of Grace; I don’t need to believe in a personal creator controlling the balance, even though others may find it helpful to do so. And that is OK with me.

Just imagine if things had developed here on earth with the slightest of differences in the balance of particles over anti-particles. What would exist would probably be remarkably beautiful, but we wouldn’t be here to reflect on the beauty and wonder of this earth we call home.

This concept of Grace is echoed for me in a poem by the13th-century Persian poet a Sufi Muslim mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi.
“You are so weak. Give up to grace.

The ocean takes care of each wave
till it gets to shore.”

You need more help than you know”
The ocean taking care of each wave does not demand that the wave call it by the correct name. The ocean taking care of each wave does not demand that the wave believe anything about the ocean. There is no need on the part of the waves to believe or understand that the ocean sacrificed for them in any way.

We, are as weak as a wave, in comparison to the ocean that carries the waves to the shore.   The great story of the development of the universe and the evolution of life here on earth really has presented a glorious “pageant of blessings” for us. This “pageant of blessings” is completely and totally beyond our grandest imagination.

The tellers of the stories and myths of the many different religions through their diverse sources of wisdom literature and scriptures have tried valiantly to picture for their readers the grace that they themselves have experienced.

For example there are the many parables of Jesus that picture unexpected and unearned acceptance. There is the parable of the pearl of great price, the parable of the hidden treasure, the parable of the prodigal son. Listen now to the parable Jesus told according to Matthew, about, the kingdom of heaven being like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. 2 And after agreeing with the workers for the standard wage, he sent them into his vineyard. 3 When it was about nine o’clock in the morning, he went out again and saw others standing around in the market place without work. 4 And he said to them, “You go into the vineyard too and I will give you whatever is right.” 5 So they went. When he went out again about noon and three o’clock that afternoon, he did the same thing. 6 And about five o’clock that afternoon he went out and found others standing around, and he said to them, “Why are you standing here all day without work?” 7 They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You go and work in the vineyard too.”

8 When it was evening, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the workers and give the pay starting with the last hired until the first.” 9 When those hired about five o’clock came, each received a full day’s pay. 10 And when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more. But each one also received the standard wage. 11 When they received it, they began to complain against the landowner, 12 saying, “These last fellows worked one hour, and you have made them equal to us who bore the hardship and burning heat of the day.”

The people who had worked in the heat all day didn’t like the ending of that parable.

My mother worked hard for small wages all her life and she always struggled with that parable. Why, she wondered, should someone who didn’t work as long or as hard as someone else get paid the same amount? That just didn’t seem right to mom. She saw plenty of people around her at work who were not working as hard as she did and others who came in late for work and left early and she didn’t like it one bit.

And yet, comparing ourselves to others can get us into big trouble. We can began to feel grudgingly toward others and feel like we are being slighted in life.

It is the same when it comes to suffering. The suffering I have experienced has not been nearly as intense when compared to that of some others. It is always dangerous to compare our pain and suffering with someone else even as it is dangerous to compare our joys and blessings with someone else. My suffering and my losses came in a variety of forms: with my divorce, the death of my parents and a sibling, the various difficulties our children have experienced and of course my battle with cancer.

Ironically, it was actually during these very times when I have experienced my most powerful moments of grace. In the midst of illness, fear and grief I have experienced the most intense feelings of being truly alive and even felt my strongest sense of belonging to the interconnected web of life.

Soon after the surgery that removed the tumor from my colon, who do you suppose was admitted to a hospital room very near mine? None other than the mother of Christopher Reeve. It caused quite a stir among the nurses when Christopher Reeve came to visit his mother. I didn’t know he was a Unitarian at the time or I might have gone over for a pastoral visit.

Later, I read an interview in which Christopher Reeve was asked how he dealt with depression after he was paralyzed from the neck down. He said that he did experience a brief period of complete despair in the intensive care unit just after the accident. But then he said that he soon considered himself a “lucky guy. (He said) I realized that the only way to go through life is to look at your assets, to see what you can still do; in my case, fortunately I didn’t have any brain injury, so I still have a mind I can use.”
Man at his best, like water,
Serves as he goes along:
Like water he seeks his own level,
The common level of life,
Loves living close to the earth,
Living clear down in his heart,
Such is grace. It strikes in a moment like a wave of light breaking into our darkness, as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are OK. You don’t need to try to do anything now; perhaps later. You don’t need to seek for anything, or perform anything; nor even intend anything—simply accept the fact that you are acceptable in the universe.”

Remember, if things had gone differently in the origins of the earth, you would not be here. Such is grace.

Closing Words:  Who Said This? Mary Oliver

Something whispered something
that was not even a word.
It was more like a silence
that was understandable.
I was standing
at the edge of the pond.
Nothing living, what we call living,
was in sight.
And yet, the voice entered me,
my body-life,
with so much happiness.
And there was nothing there
but the water, the sky, the grass.