|
Foundry United Rev. |
|
|
The Difficulties of
Grace Sunday, July 23, 2006 |
|
|
II Samuel 7: 1-14a
|
David began
life as a shepherd boy living with the sheep in the field. And now he is the king
of His
people had built David a palace, a beautiful house constructed of the
wonderful cedar wood from Talking
to the prophet Nathan one day, David begins to feel guilty. He is living in a
beautiful home while the ark of God is housed in a tent. So, he proposes to
Nathan that he wants to build a house for God – he wants to build God a
temple. Nathan tells
David to go ahead with the project, but that night God speaks to Nathan, and
it turns out God is affronted by the idea of David building a house for God.
God gets a little testy about it. God
says to Nathan: “Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the Lord: Do you
suppose that I need you to build a house for me to live in?” At
first when you read Nathan’s conversation with God, you might think that God
objects to living in a house at all, that he is saying that a tent is good
enough for God. But, no, God allows that one of David’s offspring will build
a house for God and God seems comfortable with this. God seems to have no
objection to living in a nice house. No, apparently
the problem has something to do with David, not the idea of God having a
house to honor God’s name. Somehow in his plan to build a house for God, David
has stepped over some kind of line in his relationship with God. “Remind
David,” God says to Nathan, “Thus says the Lord: I am the one who took you
from the fields where you were spending all your time with sheep. And I am
the one who protected you from your enemies. I am the one who has been with
you wherever you have gone. And I am the one who has been taking care of you.
I am the one who will make for you a great name. I am the one who will build
a house for you.” It is
as though God were saying to David: don’t forget that you need me more than I
need you. I need nothing from you, really. But you need everything from me,
and always will. So here
is the message that God seems to be getting across to David in the story and
perhaps to us: All of us begin and end life owing God, and none of us can
ever pay the debt. All of life is a gift. All of life is grace. And life can
never be anything else but grace. Our
relationship with God and even with others always begins from the reality
that we are the recipients of a gift. We have been given what we did not earn
or deserve and what we will never, even if we live to be 160, be able to repay. All of
life is grace. Our
appropriate attitude toward God is always and forever one of gratitude toward
God and toward the universe itself and toward life. This is
what I think David’s problem was: I think David wanted to build God a house
not out of a sense of gratitude, but out of a sense of wanting to escape
gratitude toward God. David wanted to repay God so that he would not have to
owe God. He wanted to get his debts to God off of his back. This is
what God became testy about – as though building a temple could compensate God
for all of the ways that God had blessed David. Gratitude
is a hard thing to live out of and to live with. All of us, I hope,
experience gratitude. Who of us who has been watching what is happening in southern
Who of
us, when we think about it, does not experience a taste of gratitude when our
lives, relatively speaking, are so calm and peaceful? Sometimes
when I am on my bicycle I experience this wonderful feeling, this flash of
gratitude that, aging as I am, my body is still relatively healthy and strong
enough to be pedaling a bicycle. Sometimes
there is a flash of gratitude just for life itself…the simple fact that I am here,
when I didn’t have to be here. I could have never been. Life itself is a
gift. I hope
all of us have experiences of the taste of just being grateful for all of the
goodness and blessings that we have received and for life itself. But
living in a continual posture and spirit of gratitude is something different.
It is very difficult and may even be impossible for us. To receive every
moment and circumstance and aspect of life as a gift: this is a hard thing. We want
to feel as though we’ve earned our blessings. There
was an old mystery series in which the main character was a man named Nero
Wolf. Every time a client came to meet with him, Nero Wolf would begin by
asking the person: How do you justify your existence? What is the
justification for your existence? People
would talk about good deeds they had done or the important work that they do.
But it always seemed to fall a little flat. The reason for that is that the
only real answer is: My existence is justified because God and the universe
have given me the gift of life. All of life is a gift. My only justification
for being is that I have received life as a gift. One of
the reasons why it is hard to maintain this posture, this spirit of gratitude
is because there is always something within ourselves (and I know this well),
there is something within ourselves that wants to feel sorry for ourselves.
If you are living out of a spirit of gratitude for even being, for everything
that we have received, for every gift within our body and our mind and our
spirit, it is really hard to feel sorry for yourself. William
Sloane Coffin used to say that there is no greater pleasure in life than
waking up in the morning and beginning our day by raking our garden of
grievances, our garden of grievances, all of the things in life about which
we are resentful or unhappy. Just to rehearse that and to live out of this
sense of things that we have somehow been cheated out of in life. He says
that it is a delicious pleasure. We can’t live out of our grievances if we
live in a spirit of gratitude. Another
reason it is hard to maintain this spirit of gratitude is that actually it
does not allow us to be too hard on ourselves. If we fall short of
perfection, well we do. Life is a gift. Life is a gift. It is not something
we earn by being perfect any way. Everything is a blessing. We don’t deserve
any of it in the final analysis. This
week we had a staff retreat at my house for a couple of days, and for
Wednesday dinner we got this big order of Salvadoran food from a local
Salvadoran restaurant. It was great – a lot of leftovers went into our
refrigerator. That night, or the next morning, I woke up about 4 in the
morning, lay in bed for a while, tried to get back to sleep, and couldn’t
sleep, so around 5 a.m. I got out of bed, came down to the kitchen, sat there
for a while, and then at 5 a.m. in the morning opened the refrigerator and
ate a cheese quesadilla. All the
next day I felt guilty about this. I have been working so hard about eating
the right stuff and getting enough exercise, and, man, I was feeling guilty
about my 5 a.m. Salvadoran quesadilla. So I confessed my guilt later in the
day to somebody and I guess I went on about it too long because he said to
me: “You know, I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but this is such a small
thing to obsess about, isn’t it? Did it ever occur to you to be grateful you
had a quesadilla in the refrigerator in the first place?” Well, living
in a continual spirit of gratitude keeps us from being too hard on ourselves.
It is all an underserved gift anyway. It’s all a blessing anyway. And I
really think that it is this spirit of gratitude that you and I and all
humanity has such a hard time with. I think it is this spirit of gratitude that
finally makes love possible between us. Every
time we celebrate communion here at Foundry, we announce that all are welcome
to participate. You don’t need to be a member of this church. You don’t have
to be a member of any church. You don’t have to meet any qualifications. All
you need to do is answer God’s invitation to come and to receive this bread
and this wine. In a
membership orientation class one time, I was asked a question that at the
time I had no idea how to answer. The question was this: “Why should I join
this church if I can get communion without being a member? As a matter of
fact,” he said, “it seems to me that I can do just about anything I want
around this church without joining or becoming a member. So, why should I
become a member of this church?” In effect, he was asking me: “What are the
privileges of membership?” I
didn’t know what to answer because it is true that you can have communion and
I have never known anybody who was turned away from anything here because
they weren’t a member. Then it
occurred to me much later that membership in the Only later
then does it begin to say: are you willing to think about what it would mean
to live in such a way that you would demonstrate the love of God to others?
Are you willing to gratefully receive God’s love? I think
this is something to do with the ramp that we are building and that we are
breaking ground for today. You know, the ramp is a symbol of us. It is a
reality, but it is also a symbol of us attempting to be a more fully
welcoming congregation. When I
go and meet with other churches that are thinking about becoming reconciling
congregations, I am often asked the question: why do we need to say anything?
We can just be a welcoming church. Why do we need to make a statement or an
announcement that everyone, including gay and lesbian people, is welcome
here? Why do we need to say anything about it? We will just act nice and
welcoming. The
response to that, of course, is that the history of the church has been so
rejecting to gay and lesbian people that we have to say it now in order to
correct the message that we sent out in the past. We cannot just get past it
without saying it. It seems to be a hard thing for a lot of churches to say
it. You
know, I have been asked once or twice the question: We’ve got a ramp on the
side, and we’ve got an elevator, why do we need to have a ramp outside? The
answer, of course, is that we have to announce to the world that we want
everyone to be able to come in the front door. I think
the reason the church and we sometimes have problems with these things,
saying it and putting a ramp out front and all of the other things we have to
do to bear witness to the testimony that everyone is welcome here, I think
the reason why we have a hard time with this is that these things are reflections
of what we are not grateful for in ourselves. I think
there are so many of us in the church that are confused, whatever our sexual
orientation, we are confused about our own sexuality and not accepting and
welcoming and grateful for our own sexuality that we have a hard time being
welcoming to people and their sexuality. I think
there are so many of us within the church who are not welcoming of our own
ways that we are differently abled, the ways that we are not able in the ways
that the world considers ability, we are so unaccepting of it and so
resentful and ungrateful for our own physical and emotional and spiritual
limitations, that the lack of church accessibility is really an indication
that we are ungrateful for our own differences within our own self so that we
don’t want to go the extra mile to be grateful and welcoming to the presence
of others. I think
our lack of gratitude is what gets in the way of our being fully loving, and
only if we can let God love those parts of ourselves that we aren’t very
happy about, can we truly learn to love everyone whom God has given us to be
our beloved brother and sister. www.foundryumc.org |
|
|
|
|
|
|
