God’s Response – GRACE
The First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
The 3rd Sunday in Lent – March 15, 2009
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[texts: Exodus 20:1-17/I Corinthians 1:18-25/John 2:13-22]

I was not surprised to read and hear that the new fastest-growing category in American religion is “no religion.” It goes along with the often-heard phrase, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” It’s also proof of what the sociologist of religion Robert Bellah chronicled in his book

Habits of the Heart. One of the habits of the heart that Bellah uncovered was that of a woman named Sheila. She had decided to come up with her own religion – “Sheilaism” she called it – that would allow her to pick-and-choose from the best bits of faith In short, it allowed her to do as she liked. Why? Because she didn’t want a religion that would, in her words, “whack me on the can.”

Sheila and Sheilaism, along with the various studies on religion in America – including the one in Saturday’s paper talking about the shift in funeral customs – all point to the realty of the human condition: we’re searching. We’re searching, but we still want to be in control, which is the other part f the human condition. Why? Because we’re alienated from the God who created us and we go looking to fill the void so we can be whole again. However, when that God gets too close, too personal, calls too much for us to change, to grow, or to be different, we seek to fill the void with something else. We might fill it with whatever is to hand, most often we simply fill it with ourselves – “Sheilaism.”

Sheila and so many folks are caught-up in rejecting the religion of “dos” and “don’ts” that has too often been presented as authentic Christian faith. The commandments we heard from Exodus aren’t about rules – though that is how we tend to interpret them. As Walter Brueggeman, a contemporary Old Testament scholar, has written, “These commands might be taken not as a series of rules but as a proclamation in God’s own mouth of who God is and how God shall be ‘practiced’ by this community of liberated slaves.” Torah, the Law, is given as divine direction and is descriptive of how one in covenant relationship behaves. Remember, the word “religion” literally means to reconnect. What we’re talking about in being religious isn’t about rules and regulations, we’re talking about relationship.

God’s will to relationship, God’s faithfulness, God’s grace is God’s response to our human condition. The issue at hand is about practice, then. I like what Barbara Brown Taylor has written: “. . . these practices are not kindly suggestions. They express the purposeful will of God for God’s people. Those who ignore the divine teachings do so at their own peril – not because God is standing over them with a hammer, but because the teachings describe the way of life. To ignore them is to wander into the ways of death instead, where God’s faithfulness can be little use.”

I think we’ve all seen the wandering of late, haven’t we? Our world, our society, our communities caught up with greed and ignoring the common good, the respect of others and the hallowing of life. We’ve got all kinds of laws. We can even defend the erection of monuments with the Ten Commandments on them. However, if we lack practice – what good are all these things? Maybe that’s why Jesus got so ticked-off on that long-ago day in the Temple? There were all kinds of people “obeying the Law,” “keeping the rules,” but not really practicing the faith, the covenant, the relationship on which the laws, the rules were based and which they assumed.

So what did Jesus do? You heard the story. He acted very differently than the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” the practitioner of “niceness” that we’ve too-often reduced him to or made him to be. Jesus spoke boldly, decisively, forcefully and called for reform, for change in practice and in heart. He called for people to live what they professed and to practice, not just observe, the Torah – the divine direction.

His actions, his call for reform, were scandalous. Remember that a scandalon is a “tripping stone.” So, Jesus tripped people up, upset them so that they might turn – which is what “repent” means – and then they might practice God’s way and not their own. His life and teaching took him to the ultimate scandal – the cross. As Paul said it was foolishness to some and a scandal to others.

In going to the cross Jesus did more than give us a nice symbol or good jewelry. On the cross Jesus demonstrated God’s faithfulness, God’s grace, God’s willingness to practice the covenant relationship in the face of our human condition. God identifies with us – with all our frustrations, all of our sufferings, all of our powerlessness. God is faithful and the cross gives the answer to the human condition of faithlessness, of searching, of selfishness. That answer is GRACE – God’s unmerited favor, God’s relationship freely given, God’s love poured out freely for us. I like what contemporary English spiritual writer Kenneth Leech has to say in his book We Preach Christ Crucified: “A faith which seeks only to explain pain, and does not help people to share it and to overcome its destructive terrors, is a superficial faith which cannot carry us through experiences of profound anguish and desolation. In times of crisis it will be found wanting and cast aside. As Bonhoeffer said, ‘only a suffering God can help.’ It was the search for such a God which motivated Jurgen MOltmann when he returned from the prison camps seeking a God who could help to make sense of that experience. He eventually wrote The Crucified God, one of the most theological books of the twentieth century. Many people have said that without their faith in Christ crucified, life would be meaningless, its cruelty and suffering inexplicable and unbearable. That is why often the cross speaks to people and inspire people, comforts and transforms the, without their at all understanding what is happening. This is particularly true for many people who are sick and poor and who find in the crucified Christ a source of life and hope.

So at the heart of the life of the Christian community in the preaching of the crucified God. It is primarily an act of proclamation, not of elucidation. And this preaching is, at least, the proclamation that the healing of pain is a process with in the heart of God; and that it is therefore a process which contains the seeds of victory. It is the rejection of a god who is beyond pain and feeling: the remote impersonal ‘god of the philosophers.’ It is a rejection too of the belief that the world’s pain is beyond healing. There must have been a Calvary in the heart of God before it was planted on the hill of Golgotha. The need for the cross can only be located within the nature of God if that cross is to be truly redemptive. God could only have suffered on the cross if God was already that sort of God, a passionate, suffering God.” [p. 26-27] God loves us. Right into pain God loves us. That’s why they call it the passion.

God-in-Christ confronts us with grace and faithfulness. As Adam Eckhart writes, “God challenges us during Lent to confront the world’s fatalistic wisdom, to recognize its tempting power and its insufficiency. The old hypothesis of perishing is as much wrong as it is incomplete. Before there was evolution and survival of the fittest, there was God’s creating word and while there is still death, in the end there shall be new life in Christ, bestowed and breathed on us by the Holy Spirit. The message of the cross, God’s weak and foolish new hypothesis, absorbs the old hypothesis into the wholeness of the resurrection.”

God’s answer to the human condition is grace – unmerited favor, love freely offered, relationship practiced. This is not a religion that will “whack you on the can.” Rather, it is a religion that whacks us upside head and reminds us that it’s not about us. The world we live in, the communities of which we are a part – couples, families, churches, cities – are about us get out of ourselves so that we can live life in relationship. Grace calls us to live in love to, as Paul says in Ephesians, “walk in love” as Christ did. It whacks us with the demand that we love and relate as graciously, as unselfishly and as freely as God does in Jesus Christ.

How do we go about this? Well, first we have to place ourselves in God’s presence, which means we take the time to begin each day with prayer. The prayer can be as simple as taking a moment to center ourselves, shutting out the world around us, and opening ourselves to the reality that God is within us and all around us. Then we give God the day and go out into it. As I’ve suggested before, seven minutes a day can be a good start – two in the morning and five in the evening. In the evening take a moment or two to read from Scripture – there’s a reason we call it “God’s Word,” because it’s the way God continues to speak to us – and then reflect on what we’ve read. Take a moment to examine the day, ask for God’s pardon for any wrongs and for God’s help to live toward God and others the next day. One can then sleep well, knowing that the soul has been given to God.

Let me offer some suggestions for some other things we can do to build ourselves up in God’s grace. Jesus fasted in the wilderness in order to come into greater contact with the Father and to build up his spiritual strength. Lent is our reminder of this aspect of spiritual discipline and a reminder of the need to keep spiritual practices as a part of our lives. Spiritual writer James Bryan Smith says, “When we fast, we are saying ‘no’ to the uncontrolled appetites of our body and thereby gaining mastery over them. The practice of fasting will also reveal hidden things about us: short tempers, selfishness, inability to delay gratification, and so on.” We can begin fasting by doing something as simple as observing a twenty-four hour fast – no need to try to do Jesus’ forty days at this point. Following lunch resolve not to have a full meal until the following lunchtime; be sure to drink plenty of water during the twenty-four hours. Fruit juice can be taken at dinner and breakfast time. Try it, asking God to be with you, opening yourself to God’s grace so that you can come to a renewed appreciation of the food you eat and the world in which you live.

Another good, rather simple, but difficult spiritual exercise would be to fast from negativity for a whole day. Begin the day with the Psalmist’s words, “Lord, set a guard over the door of my mouth” (Psalm 141:3) and then live the day mindful of not being negative. You can honest without being negative, it just means that sometime we have to work harder at finding something positive to say. Or, try spending a day without saying anything that is dishonest, that is, don’t even shade the truth or seek to be manipulative. Again, we have to open ourselves to grace, ask for the guard over our lips – who is the Holy Spirit – and be mindful. I won’t deny that it’s work, and hard work at that, but it will bear fruit in a new awareness of God in your life, a new awareness of the preciousness of the relationships we have with others.

What I’m suggesting isn’t even remotely like “Sheilaism” and if you’re practicing a version of FIYONism (fill-in-your-own-name/a nod to the late Neal Swanson), then I invite you to discover the way of grace. I invite you to know that you can practice relationship with God and with other people through God’s grace and, pun intended, gracefully. I invite you to know that, as Paul said, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” If God’s answer is grace, what’s our response to God’s answer?

There’s only one way to find out: live it.