Hope -- A Truce With God

Hope – A Truce With God

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

June 1, 2014; 7 Easter, Year A

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11)  Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.

Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. 

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In our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, the terror of the crucifixion is over. The resurrection is now real to them. It has been forty days since the disciples first sensed that Jesus still lived. Now, resurrection has become their new normal. Resurrection was so real to them that they described Christ’s presence with them in physical terms.

They are all together and they ask Christ the big question:  “So, now. Finally! Are you going to fix things?” Their first priority – When are you going to throw the Romans out and put the good guys back in charge? That’s what we want God to do. Stop the bad stuff; empower the good.

Jesus answers: “It is not for you to know.” Aggh. I hate that. Then Jesus tells them, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” Then Jesus leaves. For good.  That was about 2,000 years ago.

So we move forward a few decades, to the second reading from First Peter. Sounds like not much has changed for the good. “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.” Fiery ordeal? I thought Jesus had overcome all of that “fiery ordeal” stuff with the resurrection – casting down death forever and inaugurating the new creation. But here we are years later and the Romans are still in charge and the little people are still going through fiery ordeals. What good is the resurrection anyway? What good is God, if nothing changes for the better?

You know how it is when someone writes what you’ve been thinking, only says it better than you could? That happened to me recently as I read Lonni Collins Pratt’s little book Radical Hospitality, Benedict’s Way of Love. She’s lived through her own fiery ordeal, the six-month suffering from cancer that killed her first child before the baby’s first birthday. She says she’s got questions for God. Here’s how she frames some of it.

If I had it within my power to keep people from suffering with cancer, I would. If I could protect every child in the universe from abuse and neglect, I would. If I could feed every hungry person, bring justice to every injustice, I would. If my best friend had a brother she adored who was dying and suffering, and she asked me to heal him – if I had the power to do so, I would. No questions asked. No questions needed. I would do it because I love my friend. I would do it because it’s right. I would do it because cancer is a horrific disease. I would do it because I care – I care deeply.

Based on God’s track record, it appears that I am more loving than God. [i]

Have you ever felt that way? You might have had those thoughts repressed out of you by someone or some church that told you You can’t think that way. Well I can; and I do.

Lonni Pratt says that at times, doubt has driven a wedge in her relationship with God. She’s walked away, or tried to walk away. But she says her heart still yearns to believe, and her believer’s doubt leads her “back to God, deeper into God.” But in doing so, she’s had to give up some things she once believed about God. She finds she emerges from “the dark night of doubt battered, but clear-headed.” What she’s gained by doubting, is Hope.”  Here’s how she puts it:

Faith is a gift of God, a thing that overshadows us and chases us down. We do not find faith; it finds us. Hope is a choice to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that God is going to make sense of all of this insanity someday. Healing will come in the wings of God, a peace will cover the earth from shore to shore, and a thing so bright and beautiful will emerge that it will all have been worth it.

Faith crushes me sometimes, because I have found God to be maddening and inescapable. Hope is my response to this Divine Passion that chases me down when I run. Hope is the title of the truce between God and me.

“Hope is the title of the truce between God and me.”

How can you make sense of a horrible tragedy that happens to the innocent? Yet it happens thousands of times a day on this darkened earth. We can sound pretty silly saying something about knowing God’s will with one breath and then speaking of God’s unknowable mystery in the next? Maybe it’s more honest to surrender and admit that we don’t have a clue about what God is doing.

Lonni says this:  I have had to forgive God for being obscure and magnificently mystifying. I’ve come to realize that God is not intentionally baffling; it is not some part of the bigger plan that we find God inexplicable. There’s no big lesson in this state of God’s being. It is just the state of what is. All that godliness makes God completely other, completely unlike anything or anyone else, and beyond comprehension. In the twisting turns of my journey, I’ve learned that it is my ideas about God that need forgiving – my idea that God would protect me, God would heal people I love, God would grant me and mine special benefits, God would right the wrongs…

I believe God is good. I do not understand the goodness, though. I believe God loves, but it is a loving that in no way resembles my knowledge of loving. I cannot bring my knowledge or experience to this question of God and make sense of it. I hope in God’s love. I hope in God’s goodness. I don’t always comprehend the movements and presence of these realities in time and space, where I live.

Hospitality toward God has not come easy to me… I have had to make peace with God on the only terms that make any sense. Hope. I have lost all my ideas about God, but I hope in God more profoundly than ever before…

God, like any of us, insists on being accepted as is, even with the maddening obscurity, dark night of the soul, and rocks falling on innocent babies. Take it or leave it, but don’t paint it into a pretty picture, because it is anything but.

Welcoming God into my life is a daily exercise in faith and hope. When I extend hospitality to this baffling, enticing God, I also open myself to love the unlovable. To love God is to love the wild wind, the shaker of the universe, the fury of the stars, the broken child, the tortured captive; it is to find God where we don’t want to look and to walk where even devils flee. Can we really look up at the crossed beams on Good Friday and think otherwise?

As Christians, this is the God we receive. The bleeding one, misunderstood, judged, put into annihilation for nothing less than the truth. Like the long-ago disciples, we still look for the conquering God who sets up a kingdom among us. What we find is the God who suffers at our hands. Suffering may never make sense, but God is not indifferent. Christianity tells us that we do not suffer alone – God is present in our bleeding, aching, throbbing. We are not abandoned. Not forgotten. We are carved in the palm of God’s hand. We are unforgettable…

I have discovered a God I can joyfully welcome even though God is pure and absolute Stranger to me… the Divine who simultaneously bewilders and beguiles.

So the writer of First Peter tells his friends, “Don’t be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you…, as though something strange were happening to you… (Y)ou are sharing Christ’s sufferings…  Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.” Remain steadfast, he says, “for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kind of suffering.” Yet still, you can hope. Sure, “It’s not for you to know,” Jesus tells us. But we can hope.

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[i] Lonni Collins Pratt with Father Daniel Homan, OSB, Radical Hospitality, Benedict’s Way of Love, Paraclete Press, Brewster, MA, 2011. The quotes throughout this sermon are from chapter 11, Calling a Truce – Hospitality Toward God.

She Became the Face of God

She Became the Face of God

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

May 25, 2014; 6 Easter, Year A

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(John 14:15-21)  Jesus said to his disciples, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

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Jesus had just finished giving his disciples the new commandment – “Love one another.” Then tells his friends, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” So in this tense, dramatic moment, in the evening before his death, when everyone is so anxious, so afraid about what will happen to him – the one they love so much, the one they love more than anyone they’ve ever known, the one who has loved and nurtured and healed them – Jesus tells them simply, “If you love me, …love one another.”

I’m leaving, he tells them. But you will see me, because I live. I will live in the divine love which cannot die. I will send you that love, the Advocate/the Spirit, to abide with you. Abide in the Spirit of love and I will be in you. Keep loving me, and love one another, and you will see God’s Spirit revealed among you.

Lonni Collins Pratt is the author of a fine little book that we’ve used for one of our spiritual formation classes; it’s titled Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love. She tells a story of abiding love which revealed God to her in an ominous period in her life. Lonni’s was twenty, and her first child Angie was dying of cancer. At four-and-a-half months little Angela had a tumor on her shoulder. Six months later she was close to death.

In those last days the loving network of friends who helped her found it excruciating to be near little Angie. The child was a “tiny, dark-haired baby with huge eyes and a startling ethereal kind of beauty.” When you saw her, you wanted to be with her, to help. A friend organized a schedule for people to stay with Lonnie and baby Angie in shifts from two hours to overnight.  But, “it was the rare person who lasted the whole night.

“Angela was in terrible pain, pain like someone had dropped an anvil on her arm. She was prescribed pain medication to take every four hours to ease the suffering, and the medication did help – a little. About two hours after the dose she would grow restless and begin whimpering. Walking with her, holding her, singing to her, worked to quiet her and comfort her at this point.

“At about two and a half hours she could not be comforted and did not want to be held. She would lie in her crib and throw her head back and forth, her mouth open, often with no sound coming out, as if the pain could not be expressed.

“At three hours, she started screaming and trying to rock from side to side in the crib while still lying on her back. No caretaker ever made it past three hours before administering more medication…

“If the crying didn’t get you, the tumor did. She was not a large baby. The tumor on her little shoulder was the size of a large man’s fist… Her arm was engorged to the point of being useless, so when you held her, you had to prop her ram on your shoulder or support it for her.

“People avoided her,” Lonnie said. “We don’t deal with the hard realities, such as beautiful children suffering, unless we are forced to… It takes a whole lot of courage to do otherwise.” Lonni writes, “In the last few days of my daughter’s life a courageous stranger came to stay with us.

“I didn’t really know Linda very well. She was the pastor’s wife at a little conservative church one of my friends attended. They were the kind that were rather noisy about their ‘born again’ religion. I used to tell my friend that while she had a personal savior, I had the same one everyone else had and he was enough.” Lonni wasn’t sure about having Linda there with her. “I imagined her leaving religious materials in my bathroom and scolding me for not praying long enough or hard enough.

“But that wasn’t Linda. People are always better than the stereotype we try to stuff them into. She had a son who was only weeks older than Angela. Linda showed up one day and she stayed. She made tea and she cooked beef stew. She washed the sheets on all the beds and she handed [Lonni] a sleeping pill.”

Seared into Lonni’s mind is a picture of Linda one evening, looking out into a warm October night, her silhouette framed by the screen door at the back of the little house, “standing there, trying to make sense of it all, trying to understand what this child’s awful suffering said about the world and the God she loved…” Talking to herself in a shaky voice, Lonni heard Linda say, “I don’t understand why God allows children to suffer like this. I don’t know why this is happening and what it means. But I know this: You can trust a God who bleeds. When you can’t trust anything else, you can trust a God who bleeds.”

Lonni says, “Linda stood beside me during the darkest time of my life. She opened her heart knowing for sure it was going to get broken. Being with us would force her to look right into the face of realities and doubts she had been able to avoid, until she held the dying baby and thought of her own son. In becoming available to us, she paid a high price emotionally and spiritually.

“I don’t know how I would have survived without Linda. She became the face of God to me when God seemed gone. I could not find a way to pray or believe in a good God. I could not get past the anger and doubt, but I could hold on to this woman. I wasn’t sure how to take the next breath, but I could take her love and feel her love. I didn’t have to give back anything. Good thing, because I wasn’t capable of it. I could let her take care of us. I was the hardest time I’ve ever known and during it, God’s name was Linda.” [i]

On the night before his death, Jesus promises his disciples, “I will not leave you orphaned.” The King James Version puts it, “I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you…” Jesus comes to us in love, the Spirit of love. Jesus comes to us to comfort us in the love we give to one another.

In Jesus, God reveals the divine life as love incarnate, love in human flesh. Whenever we experience love from another person, it is God’s incarnation come to us yet again. The Spirit, the Advocate fulfilling the one divine commandment.

That also means that we too incarnate God on this earth. Whenever you show love another person, you make God present to them. You become the face of God. You become the Spirit and Advocate. We are the Body of Christ, Jesus’ hands and voice and caring.

Whenever you keep Jesus’ commandment, whenever you love another as he has loved us, God’s name is your name. Then and there, you are the face of God.

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[i] Lonni Collins Pratt, Radical Hospitality, Benedict’s Way of Love, Paraclete Press, Brewster, MA, 2011, p. 232-238.