Falling upward into God's grace...

Here are my worship notes for this coming Sunday, October 20th...

Introduction

“The days are surely coming, sayeth the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with my people… it will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and led them out of bondage… no, this new covenant will be written (not upon a scroll) but upon their hearts and I shall be their God and they shall be my people.”  The biblical scholar and pastor, Eugene Peterson, amplified this ancient wisdom by updating the language saying: “Then my people will know me firsthand, the dull and the bright, the smart and the slow… for I’ll wipe the slate clean for each of them… and forget they ever sinned!”

·   +  I LOVE those words from the weeping poet of Israel, Jeremiah, LOVE them!  Not only do they speak to MY heart about God’s grace, but they summarize the essence of both the Old and New Testaments for those who have ears to hear.

·   +  They acknowledge the pain of our suffering, God’s promise of both renewal and forgiveness and they are clear that the totality of our redemption and release are all God’s doing. 

·   +  We can’t buy it, own it, organize it, manipulate it or make it happen on our time table.  No, the day of the Lord’s promise comes purely out of God’s compassion – it comes to the dull and the bright, the smart and the slow, the rich and the poor, the deserving and the despised – because grace is of the Lord.

“I will wipe the slate clean for each of them… and forget they ever sinned.”  Isn’t that beautiful? It almost always makes me weep.  And over time I’ve come to realize that my tears are one of the ways I pray – and these weeping prayers are complicated.  Some of my tears have to do with gratitude, some with shame; part of my tears is an expression of what St. Paul called “sighs too deep for human words” while another part has to do with trusting that God is in control over those things I cannot comprehend.  I cry out of solidarity and joy, anguish and fear and have come to know that there are tears that I will never understand in this life no matter how long I live.

·   In fact, I weep so much in prayer that when I was first getting started in ministry some of my colleagues back in Cleveland used to call me Jeremiah: the weeping prophet.  We had biblical nick names for some of the other ministers, too.  One was Ezekiel – the mystical prophet – another was Amos – the angry prophet – and still another was Isaiah – the royal and poetic prophet. But I was Jeremiah – the weeping poet of Israel – who experienced the word of the Lord as both judgment and grace in my heart simultaneously.

For most of my life, you see, I have heard the call and presence of the Lord in my heart:  this new covenant “will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and led them out of bondage… no, this new covenant will be written (not upon a scroll) but upon their hearts and I shall be their God and they shall be my people.” But there’s a weird thing about trusting and loving the Lord in your heart:  the more you do it, Mother Theresa said, the more God breaks your heart.

It seems that left to ourselves our hearts are too small, too selfish, too limited to be filled with God’s love, so they have to be broken in order to share God’s love with those who need it the most.  Another prophet I have loved, William Sloan Coffin, who used to preach at Riverside Church in New York City, put it like this:

If indeed, we are to love the Lord with all our hearts, minds and strength, we are going to have to stretch our hearts, open our minds and strengthen our souls whether our years are three and ten or not yet twenty.  God cannot lodge in a narrow mind.  God cannot lodge in a small heart.  So if we are to love and accommodate the Lord, our hearts must become palatial.

Now I believe Coffin is mostly right about this – to love the Lord with all our hearts, minds and strength – they have to be stretched and opened and strengthened – until they become truly palatial.  But I disagree with Coffin on one point and that is I don’t believe we can do this all by ourselves.  We may WANT to have more open minds and more loving hearts – we may desire to live with more compassion in a selfish and mean-spirited culture – but there is no evidence that we can really make it happen all by ourselves.

·   +  Not only is the old saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” all too true, so is the doctrine of original sin.  You can’t read a newspaper, check your messages or listen to CNN without some awareness of human greed, violence or selfishness.

·    + I like the way Mohandas Gandhi reworked the words we know as the seven daily sins; I have them hanging on the wall in my study because he makes their universality so much clearer:  “The evidence of sin,” Gandhi said, “can be seen wherever there is wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, science without humanity, knowledge without character, politics without principle, commerce without morality or worship without sacrifice."

So what I want to share with you today is a reflection on the enormity of God’s love. Specifically I want to consider how it is that God can use even the universality of sin to open our minds and deepen our hearts for love.  I have been convinced that St. Paul was right when he proclaimed that there is NOTHING that can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.  In Romans 8 he wrote:

We believe that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus and we know that in everything God works for good with those who love the Lord and are called according to God’s purpose.  Therefore we are certain that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, height or depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God we have found in Jesus our Lord.

He promises that there is nothing – not life or death – neither sin nor politics – not the powers of evil or human selfishness and greed – that will have the last word when it comes to our hearts: God’s love is greater than all of this and is always at work to fill our hearts with grace.  And that is what I want to talk about with you this morning, ok?  Jeremiah got it right when he told us:  “The days are surely coming when I will make a new covenant with my people… it will not be like the one I made with their ancestors… no, this new covenant will be written (not upon a scroll) but upon their hearts and I shall be their God and they shall be my people.”

Insights

But here’s the catch:  most of the time, most of us all don’t believe this is true.  I mean that.  If we even take the time to really listen and consider the weeping prophet’s words – and most of us think we’re too busy to do even that – when we’re honest the truth is we don’t really believe that the world of the Lord works this way.

·   And I don’t say this to scold you or shame you.  It is simply the human condition – and most people throughout all time cannot help but NOT trust this truth.

·   Left to ourselves we believe we are the exceptions:  we believe that if we work hard enough, act nice enough, look good enough and trust deeply enough in the American dream, then things will work out.

In a word, most of us believe that the way to happiness and holiness has something to do with being in control – being in charge of our lives and our destiny – and for a period in time this illusion seems to work.  And then something happens that we can’t control:  we’re in a car accident – a loved one is stricken with incurable cancer – our pet has to be put down – our beloved betrays us – the economy goes south – the roof of your house is torn off by a tornado. Take your pick:  you know what I’m talking about right?  Sometimes there are just things that happen to us that knock us down, wipe us out and hang us up wet to dry that are beyond our control and ability to comprehend or change.

·   And we hate not being in control.  I hate – every holy person, mystic and poet I have ever met hates it – all the members of every church I have ever served over 30 years hates it – and I would go so far as to say this hatred is another part of the human condition.

·   We hate not being in control – we act out when we know we’re not in control – we blame others and rail against the Lord when we’re not in control.  And still nothing changes or gets better because… we’re not in control.

This is the first truth I want to share with you today:  God has set creation in motion and organized real life In such a way that it is inevitable that at some point in our lives we are going to bump up against the fact that we are not in control.  We are going to lose.  We are going to fall.  We are going to have to surrender because our hearts have been broken, our energy depleted and our personal resources exhausted.  And no matter how much we hate this fact, no matter how much liquor we drink, no matter how hard we choose to fight it, no matter who we blame, it isn’t going to change.  There are some things we can’t fix because creation has been set in motion in such a way that we will fall and fail somewhere along the line.

·   That’s part of what Jeremiah was called to tell his people 600 years before Jesus.  Over and over again, he told them that because they refused to learn from their broken hearts, they were going to keep experiencing sorrow and suffering until they became sick and tired of making themselves sick and tired.

·   He asked them to remember the first time they experienced the love of the Lord – that’s a reference to the Exodus – when God heard the cries of the people in slavery and set them free from their oppression in Egypt.

Once upon a time, God liberated the people and they were invited to live in what is called a covenant relationship with God and one another:  Part One of the first covenant was that God would set the people free; Part Two was that they were to live lives of gratitude.  In essence, they were to share the blessings of freedom, compassion and right relationships with one another – and all the people they met – because that was the gift God freely gave to them.  One scholar put it like this:

The original covenant Yahweh made with Moses at Mt. Sinai… was the central event for all Israelite life and thought in what we know of as the Old Testament… In it Yahweh promised to liberate the Hebrews from slavery and in return they promised to act like liberated people. That meant two things: worshiping only Yahweh and treating others in the same manner that they had been treated by God. They were to live lives that were different from those of the other nations. They were a chosen, liberated people and their only requirement was that they were to act like it: they should be different from their idolatrous, brutal neighbors. This is the basic theological assumption of much of the Hebrew Scriptures (including Jeremiah).

·   +  Now is that clear?  Jeremiah asked his people to remember how God acted in their lives at the very beginning because it was a blessing.

·   +  Then he asked them to reflect on their sin:  is there anything we can LEARN from this pain?  Is there any sense that we want an alternative to this suffering?  Or do we want to keep acting like we can make things better even though we can’t?

Now please understand this because it is very important:  Jeremiah (and James) is not saying that there is a one-to-one correspondence between all of our sin and all of our suffering.  He is not saying that all of their pain is a direct punishment from the Lord.  No, he is saying that if you live in a way that is self-centered and mean-spirited, there are consequences. 

·   +  And one of the unexpected consequences has to do with God’s grace.  Jeremiah’s point is that God’s love is present even in the middle of our agony.  Will our broken heart – our pain – our falling allow us to ask for God’s help?  Will it be the cause of a change of heart and a change of direction?  Will it give us enough trust to say, “Ok, Lord, I give up.  You be in charge?”

·   +  For that is the way our powerlessness – our sin – our failings can become a blessing:  when they make us sick of being sick and tired and in control.  When they open the door in our lives to let the Lord return as the Lord.

One of my spiritual mentors, Fr. Richard Rohr, explains this paradoxical truth like this:  “Some have called this principle of going down to go up a “spirituality of imperfection” or “the way of the wound.” It has been affirmed in Christianity by St. Thérèse of Lisieux as her Little Way, by St. Francis as the way of poverty and by Alcoholics Anonymous as the necessary First Step” where we confess that we are powerless to control alcohol and surrender to a higher power.

 St. Paul taught this unwelcome message with his enigmatic “It is when I am weak that I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). Of course, in saying that, he was merely building on what he called the “folly” of the crucifixion of Jesus—a tragic and absurd dying that became resurrection itself.

You will not know for sure that this message is true until you are on the “up” side. You will never imagine it to be true until you have gone through the “down” yourself and come out on the other side in larger form. You must be pressured from on high, by fate, circumstance, love, or God, because nothing in you wants to believe it, or wants to go through it. Falling upward is a secret of the soul, known not by thinking about it or proving it but only by risking it—at least once. And by allowing yourself to be led—at least once. Those who have allowed it know it is true, but only after the fact.

And that is the second truth for today:  that even in the midst of our suffering and failings, God has set creation in motion in such a way that our broken hearts can be a way of returning and blessing.  How does the weeping poet put it? “This new covenant will be written (not upon a scroll) but upon your hearts and I shall be your God and you shall be my people.”

Conclusion

Two essential spiritual truths that spring from the Scripture and make all the difference in the world:

·   +  The first is that we are going to sin – and fall – and fail and there is nothing we can do to prevent this.  We will hate it – we will fight it – but we can’t change it.

·   +  The second is that God’s love is so great that even our hatred and broken hearts can become a pathway into blessing if we are willing to trust.

Now let me confess, beloved, that I don’t know WHY this is true.  On some days I hate it, too and ache for it to be different.  But it really doesn’t matter what I feel or think or want.  Like God said to Job after Job had his rant:  “Where you there, man, at the beginning of creation when I hung the stars and moon in their place and set everything In motion?” 

·   +  Another one of my spiritual mentors, Craig Barnes of Princeton Theological Seminary, has written:  “Look, I’ve tried to help God be more rational in the past and it has only led to more problems.  So finally I’ve learned that we’re not expected to make sense of God.  We’re just called to obey.”

·   +  I can’t explain why this falling upward thing is true – all I can tell you is that as I have come to trust and obey it – God’s love has broken and strengthened my heart.  God’s love has opened my mind and God’s love has stretched my soul.

So maybe you’re at a place in your life where you are sick and tired of being sick and tired.  Maybe you hate not being in control and don’t know what else to try.  Maybe you heart has been broken and your world turned upside down by fear and pain and shame.  I don’t know what it is for you… but maybe today is the time for a new covenant with the Lord to be written on your heart.  If that is true, take a moment as we play some music for reflection to simply say in your heart: 

Come, Lord Jesus, be my Lord.  I am tired – I am weak – I am worn.  It is time for you to take control and let me obey….