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This Grace Was Given
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 19, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Psalm 40:1-11 Ephesians 3:1-21
“I am really beginning to like the ministry,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr in 1920. “A young woman came to me the other day and told me that my talk on forgiveness several months ago has brought about a reconciliation between her mother and sister after the two had been in a feud for five years. There is redemptive power in the message!” Niebuhr writes and writes almost incredulously. “I could go on the new courage that come out of that little victory for many a month.” There is this gospel, this grace, this message with redemptive power, this news that is good beyond all our comprehending. And its proclamation week after week, year in and year out, century upon century, is certainly not polished, seldom eloquent, clearly inadequate, yet how mercifully made capable of communicating the reality of God’s grace—especially it would seem, at those times when we preachers deem ourselves incapable of one coherent point let alone three. You, of course, are the great congregation of which the psalmist sings: gathering Sunday after Sunday to listen anew for a redemptive word; wondering each week if this incredible word of grace could possibly be true for you. Paul’s words to the Ephesians, therefore, hold in solution the deepest prayer a preacher can pray for those given into her care: “That you may have the power to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” What I know is that God’s grace is given to you, that Christ has died for you, that God’s everlasting arms surround you with such love that never can you fall as far as you think you have fallen from God’s love. I know that this grace is for you! What I do not know and what the 40th psalm leads me to ask on this morning of high celebration is whether or not God’s grace is for those called to proclaim the gospel in Word and sacrament. So I ask you in the great congregation to bear with these ruminations concerning a preacher’s faith as Casey sets out this day on the sometimes dark, always humbling, often winding road of ordained ministry. “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry” begins the 40th psalm. No doubt this is the song of one who has been delivered from great affliction by God’s grace. He speaks of his redemption from the miry bog and then reminds God that he has been a witness to this deliverance in the great congregation—held nothing back—and so hopes that the mercy he has known before will yet again be given. This is, most likely, a proper reading of a seemingly straightforward psalm. Now listen again with the ears of a preacher called to proclaim God’s grace and mercy and steadfast love to the great congregation week in and week out: “I have told…I have not restrained…I have not hid…I have spoken…I have not concealed: Do not thou, O Lord, withhold thy mercy from me….” It is as though the one who has been called to proclaim the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s immeasurable mercy and love is left to wonder whether that love is also for him…also for her. The doubt that stalks us in a particular way is not a doubt as to our calling, nor is it a doubt as to our vocation as bearers of God’s grace to the one before us, nor is it a question of the truth of God’s mercies. This is the question asked by each one in the great congregation. Yet now it is asked by one for whom there is no preacher: Is God’s grace and mercy for me? We must, like the whiskey priest of Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory, conclude not. After a novel full of running, the whiskey priest is apprehended. As he is being taken to his executioner, the lieutenant guarding him says, “Well, I suppose you’re hoping for a miracle.” “Excuse me, what did you say?” asks the priest. “I said I suppose you’re hoping for a miracle.” “No” he says. “You believe in them don’t you?” “Yes” says the priest. “But not for me.” But not for me. Why? Is it that a preacher’s sin seems all the more insidious because sainthood is both expected and yet so far out of reach? Or could it be that God has called us but has withheld from us, in Greene’s words, the little self restraint and the little courage that our calling finally requires? Or is it that the dissonance between our utter humanity and the world’s misplaced projection of holiness are so great that there can be no honest experience of grace…because there can be no place where our brokenness is known and forgiven and healed, no community that ever would take us in if they knew us truly, and so surely no God gullible enough to be graceful toward us? I do not know why, finally. I simply know there is some strange coincidence between those called to speak of God’s salvation to the great congregation and those left to plead, “Do not thou, O Lord, withhold thy mercy from me; let thy steadfast love and thy faithfulness ever preserve me.” The coincidence turns us again to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians where, almost as preface to his proclamation of God’s grace to the Gentiles, he lets us in on the pathos of God’s grace to him. Three times he mentions grace in a self-referential way and three times we are given a glimpse of the nature of God’s grace to those called to proclaim it. First Paul writes, “For this reason, I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles—assuming you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given me for you.” The stewardship of God’s grace: it is a task you are about to be given, Casey. Yet if a steward then never a possessor…if a steward then an earthen vessel, perhaps…through which God’s mercy is made to meddle in human affairs. But Paul’s point is that this grace is first not for us but for the one before us. Georges Bernanos captures the incredible paradox of this in his quietly powerful Diary of a Country Priest. After an agonizing encounter with a woman who had lost her faith after her son’s death and now had been given hope because of his pastoral visit, the priest writes in his diary, “Oh miracle—sweet miracle of our empty hands! Hope which was shriveling in my heart flowered again in hers; the spirit of prayer which I lost in me forever was given back to her by God….Lord, I was stripped bare of all things as you alone can strip us bare, whose fearful care nothing escapes nor your terrible love!” Our vocation brings us to our knees, moment by moment, asking as each must ask before the throne of grace, “Is God’s grace for me?” But when the supplicant is a minister of God’s word, the almighty response would seem to be not a harsh but a humbling “No!” The stewardship of God’s grace, says Paul, is given to us now for another. Therefore the second time Paul mentions grace in reference to himself, he speaks of vocation as grace: “Of this Gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace.” In a sense, Casey, you could say that our vocation is the peculiar form of God’s grace to us—but how precarious a gift! Soon after I was ordained my New Testament professor, a Jesuit priest, wrote me a letter that I could not have understood then. As I knelt and he came forward to lay his hand upon my head, he wrote that he wanted to weep as he imagined for me the hands held for the last time in death, the babies baptized, the tears caught, the sadness borne, the deep joy shared. And he said he both rejoiced and yet wanted to spare me the abiding loneliness. The gift of God’s grace that is this ministry is the gift of being given away to another always at the point of life’s most fragile turn. Before the intractability of this created yet fallen order we are called, as you already know Casey, to the places where we find ourselves stammering for a word that is not our own, bowed down because it is only on our knees that we find the courage to stand, grateful in some perverse way to have been needed, yet deeply aware that the need is not for us but rather for the ministry of God’s grace which we have been given. So again we ask, “Is it for me” and again we know that, for all of its incredible, terrible, wonderful and wild moments, the gift of God’s grace in this ministry is given not for us but for another. Until finally Paul says, “To me…to me, though I am the very least of the saints, this grace was given.” And we begin to suspect that it is nothing less than grace itself, creating in us this question which will not let us go. Though I am the very least, to me. Unless we are never far from the moment when we most need God’s love and know not where to turn, unless there is yet something in us that prefaces even the hint of God’s grace by our own unworthiness, unless we struggle sometimes into the night with the suspicion that finally we have strayed too far to be found by the one who searches for us all, then we will never begin to catch the urgency of this Word we are given to proclaim, its breadth and length and height and depth. Casey, my colleague in ministry, the coincidence of the one who proclaims God’s grace and the one who stands in deepest need of God’s grace is, I am sure, no coincidence at all. It is God’s terrible and tender mercy come together in the very least of the saints, in you and in me and in all those set apart for this ministry. Is God’s grace for you? God’s grace is simply and profoundly that question which pursues you in the study and down the hospital corridor; finds you out at the library and in the kitchen places; invades your head as you listen to a child’s prayers and holds your heart on high as you say your own. May it not let you go until you find yourself mounting the pulpit and with the psalmist whispering, “Do not thou, O Christ, withhold thy mercy from me; let thy love and thy faithfulness ever preserve me.” Casey Wait FitzGerald, welcome to this ministry! |