Sunday, August 5, 2012

Pentecost 10 - Grace


What do you do with David?

It’s almost as if, in our idealized history that we draw from the Bible, David becomes a perfect and flawless individual – the great King who ruled over Israel, from whom came Jesus, who himself redeemed the world.  Christians love perfect people, we love ‘heroes of the faith’, who provide those tremendous examples of the perfect to which we should aspire.

When I was a little guy, I came across a book that was called ‘heroes of the faith’ – I have no idea how my family got it; we weren’t really ‘heroes of the faith’ kinds of people.  But I read that book, and it stuck with me.  It had Noah, Moses, David, Solomon, Paul…everyone you should expect.  I Googled that book a few years ago, and it turns out there’s an updated one: it includes people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa…You can probably add your own names to that list.

As I got older, though, I realized that so many of those heroes…weren’t.

We’re reading through the story of David.  I met an older Baptist minister who once told me that four elders of his church once met him in his office after he finished a series of readings on 2 Samuel, following the life of David.  They told him that if he wanted to keep his job, he’d better stick to preaching, and not destroying people’s faith in God’s chosen.

My colleague (who was well into his seventies) told those elders that he was simply reading from the Bible – after all, that was his job as preacher.  But that wasn’t the point, it was argued – he should emphasize the great work that David did, and not mention his failings.

David was an adulterer, and a hypocrite.  You heard Nathan’s accusation against him today: “YOU are the man who has acted so unjustly.”  David, so ready to wreak terrible vengeance against a greedy man, ignores his own black sins.

But David isn’t alone.  Noah was a drunkard; Moses a murderer and Paul joined him in that dubious company.  If you’ve read some biographies, you’ll know that King, though faithful to God was not always to his wife; and Mother Theresa….Mother Theresa lived in a dark night of her own soul almost from the moment she entered her convent up until the day she died.  She doubted God – doubted God cared, doubted God was even aware of what was going on, doubted God even existed – but still she prayed.  Still she served.

I think you can probably add your own names to a life’s list of fallen heroes: people who we think we’ve known, or trusted, or learned from, but who’ve we then learned have failed, or made mistakes.  When people learned of King’s infidelities and Theresa’s doubts, many made noise that they should be forgotten, that they were somehow not worthy of being considered ‘heroes of the faith’ because they were not perfect people.

We tend to feel a lot of pressure as Christians.  Pressure to be holy, pressure to be right, to be perfect, to somehow live like we don’t desperately need God’s freely-given grace and forgiveness.  We act – and tell ourselves – that’s God’s grace should be earned.  We should work for it.  We should somehow try to “pay God back” for grace that we’ve been given.

We live in a debt-ridden culture that can’t fathom being beholden to God for something as amazing as grace.

I’ll share with you something that Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written about our problem with being in debt to God:
…a human being is holy not because he or she triumphs by will power over chaos and guilt and leads a flawless life, but because that life shows the victory of God’s faithfulness in the midst of disorder and imperfection.  The church is holy…not because it is the gathering of the good and the well behaved, but because it speaks of the triumph of grace in the coming together of strangers and sinners, who miraculously trust one another enough to join in common repentance and common praise…humanly speaking, holiness is always like this: God’s endurance in the middle of our refusal of him, his capacity to meet every refusal with the gift of himself.

Grace, then, is God giving us what we need before we even know we need it.  And it is God continuing to give us what we need after we’ve found out we need, and then insist that we can somehow provide it for ourselves. 

However, visible blessings we can’t get enough of.  It’s like we’re the family that is in over our head in debt, but still scrimping together the monthly payments on the Escalade so the neighbours think we’re doing fine. 

That’s the crowd that hangs out with Jesus.  They go looking for him, but he’s left.  So, they all go looking for him.  Remember, this is the same crowed that numbered 5000 men, plus women and children.  That’s a lot of boats on a fairly little lake.  But they go looking, and they do find Jesus.

When they find him, though, Jesus doesn’t seem to pleased with their effort: “truly, I tell you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.”  Ouch.

But how many time do we hear that?  The millionaire athlete giving credit to Jesus for touchdowns, runs batted in, or more goals made.  Singers, actors, everybody loves the blessings.  Jesus is easy to love when there are blessings to be had.  But strip away those blessings…and who wants to put forth the effort – the investment – in something that doesn’t seem to offer a high return?

The crowd loves the work of God.  They love the loaves, the healing, the blessings.  It’s all good.  It’s so good, in fact, that they want to be able to do it for themselves: “what must we do to perform the works of God?” 

Surely, Jesus, there must be something we can do to make us able to be just like you.

And Jesus does give the crowd an answer.  But to a crowd that is used to the system of the Law with its requirements and obligations, it’s not the answer they want.  They want the economic system they’re expecting.  You give something tangible, you get something tangible, touchable.

But Jesus says: “This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent.”

That’s it.  That’s all.  The great work of God that we partake in is nothing less than to believe in the One sent by God; the Alpha and the Omega; our beginning, and our ending.

God’s economy doesn’t look like the temple.  It doesn’t look like the Pharisees.  It doesn’t look like the Law, which is meant to establish order and keep people in line.  God’s economy looks like grace – given but not deserved, and recognized the most by those who know their relationship with God has been fractured beyond all hope of human repair.

Because when things are beyond hope of human repair, we finally realize that our only true hope – our only true sustaining force, our only true bread – is Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, the grace of God, and our only true repentance.

That is the gift that David found.  Having known that he irreparably fractured his relationships in the world, all he had left was to trust that God would remain faithful in the face of David’s own incorrigible faithlessness.

And God did; the fruit of his promise to David realized in another promise to a teenage unwed mother that the child in her womb would save the people from their sins.

And that child did just that.  From the womb, to the cross, from the cross, to the grave, and from the grave to everlasting life Christ bore out the promise of God’s own unending and unbelievable grace – the promise that YOU are the beloved of God.

You are the beloved of God because of Jesus’ love for you; the beloved because you believe.  Not what you do.  There is nothing you will ever do that will make God love you more; there is nothing you will ever do that can make God love you less.

Believe in the Son.  Find what it means to never hunger or thirst again; because all you need has been given.

Find what grace is: those things of the Father, and of the Son, of the Holy Spirit; those things that are part of you in your baptism.

Let the people of God say amen.