Many of us who are here today did not mean to be Christians. Many of us, in fact, are not—at least not to the naked eye. Or maybe we are to the naked human eye, which sees only as far as the institutional church; but surely when the intense white light of God’s holy eye shines down upon our wasted days and wanton nights and burns, we are not! Oh, we may sing the hymns when the time comes, and read the unison prayers; we may even stand and say the Apostles’ Creed because, well, we memorized it once, though we never really bought the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection or the divinity of Jesus. And once too, we joined the church: stood in front of a congregation just as you will do today, answering in the affirmative questions whose meaning and mystery we barely grasped.

But questions rightly answered or the church’s faith properly grasped does not a Christian make. Don’t get me wrong: no one cares more about the substance of the faith than I do; but knowing a lot, even believing properly, is seldom the place where faith takes hold of a person. So what I want to proclaim to you this morning is that this ceremony, in which you will confirm the vows taken for you at your baptism, finally has to do not with your grasp of God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, or even your understanding of church doctrine: this day has to do with God’s grasp on you!

Some theologians call this grasp by another name: they call it grace and define it as the undeserved, unearned, unasked for acceptance and mercy and love of God. “Do we know what it means to be struck by grace?” asked Paul Tillich, the theologian who struck me, in the midst of my own prolonged and antagonistic agnosticism, as almost credible. “It does not mean,” he said, “that we suddenly believe that God exists, or that Jesus is the Saviour, or that the Bible contains the truth. To believe that something is, is almost contrary to the meaning of grace.” He goes on to say that grace strikes us not when we are at the top of our game, but at the bottom: “when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable.”

That is when grace—which is to say, God’s grasp on us—strikes. Grace struck Anne Lamott when she was suicidal, alcoholic, sleeping with not one but two married men: when she was clearly “going down the tubes.” Out of nowhere, she writes, it crossed her mind to call the new guy at St. Stephen’s. She remembers little of the conversation, except that when she said she did not think God could love her, he said, “God has to love you. That’s God’s job.” [I would, of course, quibble with that statement theologically: God does not have to love us, is free not to love us; hence God, to our utter astonishment, does! But this would require another sermon…with longer sentences.]

Some years later, Lamott asked him about that conversation, and he said he felt she had gotten herself so tangled up in big God question that it was suffocating her. He thought the trick was to help extricate her enough that she could breathe again. “You said your prayers weren’t working anymore, and I could see that in your desperation you were trying to save yourself; so I said you should stop praying for a while, and let me pray for you.” Grace is not about your grasp on God, but about God’s grasp on you.

Paul Tillich, the theologian I mentioned earlier, was kind of the like the new guy at St. Stephen’s for me. In words that I read when I believed myself worth exactly nothing, he said that sometimes in those moments “a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for that name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”

When your name is called in a moment to come forward, and you say yes to questions whose mystery will surround you for the rest of your life, when you kneel and have said over your head the ancient prayer said over the heads of confirmands for centuries, you will be acting out the fact that you are accepted, that God’s grace has hold of you, that as far as you run from the church, and even from any tangible trust in the God for whom you were made, the reach of your doubt will never exceed God’s tender mercy, God’s gracious grasp.

Now in the second place, as comforting as word of God’s grasp on you is, I would be remiss were I not to mention the back of God’s hand: the shove of God, let us call it, that will be yours to contend with from this day forth! No doubt for some, confirmation is the end of a road: made it through ten long years of church school, endless hours in worship, forced marches to choir or fellowship and now, at confirmation, you are free, free at last! But again, this day is not finally about what you decide as much as it is about the God in whose hand your destiny has been held from the moment you came kicking and screaming into the world. God gave you life in the world for a purpose far greater than anything you can imagine or devise. Now God’s hand shoves you back into the world to do something brave, not just for your good pleasure, but for Christ’s sake!

Here I think of the second theologian who joined me on my journey back to belief: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As I know you know, he was a German pastor and theologian who participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler and was executed for the effort just days before Germany’s liberation. In a letter he wrote from prison to Eberhard Bethge the day after the assassination attempt had failed, he speaks of what it is to live as one shoved by God into the world: “I am still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith….By this…I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problem, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world.”

If it is God who both shoves you and has hold of you in the world and not another, I promise you a life that is not about you, but about God and God’s suffering in the suffering of God’s children. You are followers of him who had no place to lay his head, disciples of him who came to give sight to the blind and set captives free. With the shove, God gives you not a set of answers but just one question: What am I, as a follower of Jesus Christ, to be and do in the world? You represent, re-present, God’s grasp upon all whom the world has forgotten. This day, then, is about God’s grasp not just on you, but on the one to whom God sends you, the one who is hungry, in prison, outcast. At the end of your days, likely the question on your dying lips will be, “Lord when did I see you in the world clearly enough to believe?” I believe the answer will come back: when you took hold of the least of these, you grasped me…and I you.

So then finally God’s grasp and shove leaves us with one question: why in the world do we have to do our believing and doubting and serving together? What the church? Can’t you just go out on your own and live by yourself in the world for others? You can, of course. But as Jesus knew better than any of us to date, it’s tough out there. So much not worth your life will vie for your allegiance, so many not deserving of your days will claim your devotion. You will forget who you are and whose you are: you will lose you way, I know. I have and I still do. That, in part, is where the church comes in: it is my job…our job to tell you, to remind you that God is and has hold of you.

When the minister of Anne Lamott’s church was about seven, her best friend got lost one day. “The little girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, ‘You could let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.’”

From this day forth, may this be the community where you are reminded of God’s grasp and where you are challenged with God’s shove. But more than these things, when you are lost in the years ahead, may you return because you know you will always be able to find your way home from here. Thanks be to God.