The Rev. Charleston Wilson
In the Name of the Living God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
What will it take – when will the day finally come – when you and I can join St. Paul and say, with absolute confidence, that God’s “grace [truly] is sufficient?”
A recent op ed published in the New York Times entitled “The Meaning of Fulfillment” asks a very first world question: “What is fulfillment made of? Is it the aggregation of all of the fulfilled aspirations of a person’s life?”
You and I live in a period of time, in a culture, literally obsessed with fulfilling aspirations,” whatever they may be, good or bad. Podcasts, TED talks, books, and You Tube are all overflowing with sage advice on how to live the so-called fulfilled, perfect life.
And, over, and over again, we all surrender to the temptation, thinking the key to happiness, the foundation of fulfilled aspirations, lies in thinking a different, more positive way – or following the latest guru’s advice. Peter Pan even went so far as to say, “Just think happy thoughts and you’ll fly.” I don’t recommend you try that.
And what can we say about people like Lynne Rosen and John Littig? They were the married co-hosts of a very popular self-help radio talk show in New York called “The Pursuit of Happiness.” He was a motivational speaker, and she was a psychotherapist. According to the police interviews, the suicide note she left, after their double suicide, was very brief, saying only, “I’m sorry.”
Don’t you find it utterly unsatisfying, and even a little shady, that you and I spend so much of our energy looking for the kind of self-fulfillment the world wants to sell, while we often miss the most fulfilling experience of all, which surely lies in discovering sufficiency of God’s grace!
What is grace?
We’ve all heard a lot of good definitions, but I’m presently keen on what I ran across this week by Paul Zahl:
Grace is when you are loved not on the basis of any of your givens OR your baggage. [It’s like] God giving the full scholarship to the candidate least qualified to receive it (from Grace in Practice).
The hour has come for Christians – for you and for me – to re-discover the sufficiency of God’s grace!
And this sufficiency – this good news – isn’t just for you and for me, for those at mass on Sunday. We’ve got to tell our friends and family, and we’ve got to tell the whole town. They all need to hear it, because most people – 95% plus of the people walking our streets – are completely convinced that things like attainment, achievement, and actualization are the only paths that lead to so-called fulfillment, to so-called perfection. That is a huge lie!
What brings life – what sustains life – comes from being in a relationship with the one who attained all, achieved all, and fulfilled all so that you and I may receive all – all His love, all His forgiveness, all His grace!
When I was taking a Peter-tide term in England some years ago, about this time of year, a friend forced me to go hear the famous Anglican evangelist Michael Greene, whom I’ve gotten to know over the years. Back then, however, the very last thing I wanted to do was go hear some old preacher croon about this guy named Jesus (I haven’t always been this holy!). Anyway, Michael gave a tremendously rousing sermon at Holy Trinity, Brompton in which he laid out the gospel of grace in the clearest of terms. And, then he had the audacity – the sheer nerve – to demand that we share the good news with others. He screamed, in a very guttural English accent, “Get cracking!”
We don’t use that phrase in Alabama; I’d never heard of “get cracking” before. I’m still not really sure I know what it means. But, it doesn’t matter, because Michael was so impassioned about it – so on fire about the idea – that I leaned over and told the complete stranger sitting next to me, “Yeah, that’s right; I’m about to ‘get cracking’ in here!”
You and I need to “get cracking.” We’ve got to tell and show the whole world that God’s grace is sufficient for everything – for adolescent anorexia, for children who come home after a terrible divorce, for the wayward child, for terminal illness, for bankruptcy, for your aging dad, your critical mother, your crazy sibling, for depression, for addiction, and for anything else! His grace is sufficient.
“Grace,” writes St. Augustine, “is meant to help people, not to escape their sufferings, but to bear them with a stout heart, with a fortitude that finds its strength in faith.”
I’ve just finished a clever little book about the Queen’s sense of humour. It’s called the Wicked Wit of Queen Elizabeth II by Karen Dolby, and there is a great story from her coronation in it. Dolby writes:
On 2 June 1953 in Westminster Abbey, Queen Elizabeth took the coronation oath. What none of the 8,000 guests packed into the Abbey or the millions watching on television sets around the world heard was the Queen’s frantic whisper to Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher. Friction between her heavy state robes and the carpet had her firmly fixed to the spot [in her chair] and she needed a firm push to get her going. [She anxiously whispered to the Archbishop,] “Get me started!”
I love that little plea for help – “get me started.” It’s the perfect prayer for you and for me so we may “get started” on grace again today.
And it takes a little prodding to get started, because this grace stuff is radically counter-cultural, because grace doesn’t give like the world gives. Fr Capon always strikes the right chord: “Even to this day, grace remains hard to swallow. Religiosity and moralism go down easier than free forgiveness.” I believe deep within each of us there is a tiny little “grace-hater,” a little part of each of us that instinctively rejects the idea of one-way love, a part that wants to bring some shred of supposed self- decency and some morsel of try-harder moral superiority to God’s big party.
But, the Gospel of Jesus Christ doesn’t say that we have to try harder to save ourselves: The Gospel proclaims the free gift of God’s love centrally in His Son, who died that we might live, so that we might come to grips, once and for all, with the sufficiency of His grace.
The greatest wealth you and I can bestow on someone else – as parents, grandparents, as friends – isn’t monetary at all; it’s spiritual. It’s a life that demonstrates, in good times and bad, that God’s grace is sufficient indeed.
We all want to sound like John Newton in the end: “Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; ‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.”
We all yearn for such an experience. Let’s get started again today.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Charleston D. Wilson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
8 July 2018