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The Space
for Grace
by the Rev. Rich Smith
September 16, 2007
Luke 15:1-10
The hardest thing about coming back from four months of
sabbatical is not getting back into the routine of going to work every
day, being on call 24/7, having to responsibly produce things like a
weekly sermon – no this is all part of the life I was called to and I
am most gratified to be about. No, the hardest part is simply the
traffic – and not the amount so much as the drivers themselves, those
who tailgate, and honk as they cut you off and pass in order that they
may be first at the red light! I had gotten so used to it, I suppose,
that I was quite surprised when I spent time in Canada and discovered
that drivers nearly always stop at cross walks, for instance, and bus
passengers routinely thank the bus driver when they disembark! They pay
attention to turn signals and allow you to merge. There is a certain
civility that seems to permeate Canadian culture, at least the part I
experienced, a civility often missing in our Type-A, dog-eat-dog,
hard-driving, get-ahead-at-all-costs culture. I particularly notice it
now while driving. I try to do what I was taught to do in drivers
education forty years ago – pay attention to the other driver’s turn
signals and maintain a safe following distance, what I call a space for
grace. (See, I think theologically even while driving!) More often than
not someone will try to take over that space, so I back off and create
another one. I know, some of you are thinking, “So you’re the one
jamming up the roads!” But I try to be counter-cultural any way I
can....and today, I feel pretty sure that’s what I’m doing in preaching
this sermon which I also call “The Space for Grace.”
My premise is that while grace is all around us, a lot of us do not
routinely open ourselves to its presence and its gifts. Maybe it’s
because life in Washington is not particularly conducive to it. A lot
of people here are on their way up – trying to advance, trying to make
partner, trying to secure the votes for their project, bring home the
bacon for their district, to win the next election.... We got here
because we’re the brightest and the best and the most hard-working,
dedicated; we’ve got great bootstraps – and our children will ace the
SAT’s and have great resumes and get into the best colleges.... We earn
what we get, and grace really doesn’t have much to do with it. How
would life be different if it did?
I am reminded of the words of Frederick Buechner, in his book Wishful
Thinking: “Grace is something you can never (earn) but only be given.
The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might
never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been
complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things
will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate
us. It's for you. I created the universe. I love you. There's only one
catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you
reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a
gift too.”
In order words, grace is something you cannot earn but only accept, you
have to make a space for it. It’s a free gift that defines –as much as
you can define – the very nature of God. Like the love of a spouse, or
the forgiveness of an enemy, the beauty of a crisp fall day, or the
movement of a violin aria – all things we cannot possibly earn – God’s
gifts and love come unbidden and undeserved. It’s simply a matter of
making the space in our lives to receive them.
Now, Jesus spoke a lot about grace. He didn’t really use the word – he
was not given to theological discourses – mostly he told stories and
then acted out his belief in a gracious and loving God in the way he
treated others. And so many of his parables are really about grace –
about the love of God showing up in places you’d never expect, like the
Prodigal Son or The Laborers in the Vineyard.
Today, for example, we hear two parables, known as “the lost sheep” and
the “lost coin.” They might be better described as “No Sheep Left
Behind” or maybe “the perfectionist shepherd and the frantic woman,”
kind of edgy images for God, after all – shepherds and women were
pretty low-status folks in those days. At face value they are a both a
little confusing and even counter-intuitive. I mean, does it make sense
to abandon ninety-nine of your best sheep to go after the one who has
wandered away? Not very good triage, is it? Who knows what could happen
to them while you’re out looking for the lamb you’ve named Steve
Fossett? And that careless woman who can’t keep her money straight? Do
we really have much sympathy for her? But then we discover that Jesus
told these stories in response to grumbling he was hearing from the
scribes and Pharisees – grumbling being a time-honored behavior in all
religions! “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Well,
that’s the way God is, Jesus responds. God goes out of God’s way to
seek the lost – those who, though they may not deserve it, who have no
claim on divine grace, nevertheless are loved by God, and God wants
them in the fold. That’s grace. And grace becomes a problem for the
scribes and Pharisees, because their world is one of rewards and
punishments. You earn what you get in life, and you get what you
deserve. So when they see Jesus spending time – eating, for heaven’s
sakes! – with sinners, tax collectors and prostitutes, they just can’t
handle it. Resources of love getting squandered on the undeserving. We
know, of course, that they do not see the hypocrisy in it – that they
themselves are really the ones who are lost and need finding, and that
God loves them, too, in spite of it. They didn’t earn it by being so
good. As Henri Nouwen says, “You are not loved because you are
precious, you are precious because you are loved.”
There is a modern corollary about this, phrased perhaps negatively, but
it goes, “Expecting the universe to treat you well because you are a
good person is like expecting the bull not to charge you because you
are a vegetarian!” Rewards and punishments, deserving or undeserving,
is not the point. As Jesus put it in the Sermon on the Mount, “The rain
falls on the just and the unjust alike.” And as Buechner said,
beautiful and terrible things will happen, but God is there no matter
what. The point is, to learn to accept the grace, to live in it, to
make a space for it in our lives, and to extend grace to others!
I’ve been living in that grace for the last four months – I guess I
always have, but on sabbatical one more easily notices it. A sabbatical
itself is grace. My contract might say I earned it, but still it was
experienced as a gift. And it was full of gifts – unplanned encounters,
breath-taking sights, seemingly spontaneous revelations. And there were
simple things, like picking raspberries. Wild raspberries, are to me,
the perfect example of grace. I didn’t plant them, I didn’t have to
water and tend them. Nothing I have done gives me any claim on them.
All I have to do is notice them, be willing to take a slight detour
from my stated goal of hiking up the mountain, and I figure that if the
bears didn’t eat them first, then they must be waiting for me. Of
course some effort is required – I do have to bend over and pick them.
But what a gift from nature and nature’s God!
Our lives are full of such gifts, and I could tell more stories, as I
am sure you could, about the ways that grace comes to us in unexpected
places, through the least likely of persons, about the ways that our
lives are closer to what God intends because we were sought and loved
and brought into the fold, when we learned that we didn’t have to
struggle for God’s love, because it’s just there, like the air and the
sunshine. We don’t have to struggle for it, although we do often
struggle within in it. Again, as Frederick Buechner says, “Grace is
something you can never (earn) but only be given. The grace of God
means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but
you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here
is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be
afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you. I
created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any
other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you reach out and
take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.” And
he asks, “Now that you don’t have to do anything, what will you do?”
I, at least will try to make a space for grace, not just in my driving,
but in my life. And unlike those complaining scribes and Pharisees, I
will covet that grace for others.
Now, let me close with an ongoing story about the current state of
grace on our extended family. My middle brother, Paul, and his wife,
Debbie, had three daughters, two now out of the house and one a
teenager. About three years ago they decided they’d like another child,
a boy if possible, and so they set about researching how to accomplish
this. They ended up adopting a boy from Russia, Sergei, who is now
eleven, and after making it through the minefield of a foreign adoption
and the adjustments of the first couple of years, he’s pretty well fit
in and things are going fairly smoothly. Then, about a month ago my
brother had taken Sergei fishing up at our cabin, and Debbie was out
with a friend who asked casually, “Do you think you’ll ever consider
adopting again?” “Well, I don’t know,” said Debbie, “We haven’t really
thought about it, but I suppose if the opportunity comes our way, we’ll
be open.” Just then her cell phone rang. It was the adoption agency.
“We have a little Ukrainian girl who is over here on a trial visit with
a prospective family, but it’s just not going to work out. Is there any
chance you’d want to at least meet her?” So Debbie and her girls met
Galia, six years old, and of course fell in love. Fortunately Paul and
Sergei returned from fishing before Galia had to go back to the
Ukraine, and they too were smitten. So it became a matter of waiting
until all the details could be worked out and they would go over there
and bring her back. They said goodbye for now, and got to work
preparing, marveling at how things work out – they definitely see this
as grace at work – and then came another phone call. Seems Galia has a
sister, nine years old, in a different orphanage, but still in the
Ukraine, and they simply cannot separate them, so it’s a package deal.
Being hooked, what are they to do? Fortunately their home and the
hearts have plenty of room. Then another phone call. The sister may not
be nine, she may be four, we hope that’s okay. All right, we can handle
that. Then another call. The reason we don’t know the age is that Galia
may have two sisters! Four AND nine. But we’re not sure, and you may
not find out until you go to Ukraine to get them! So as my brother
says, “Some people have surprise pregnancies; we are just having a
surprise adoption”. I’ll keep you posted.
Well, God’s gifts always come in abundance, they are always surprising,
and there is no telling how many of these amazing blessings may enter
our lives when we make a space for grace!
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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