Palm Sunday
April 1, 2007Church of the Covenant
Robert J. Campbell, D. Min., D. D.
Printer-Friendly VersionGrace Notes
Part VI, Green Spots
Galatians 2:15-21 LR
Luke 7:44-47The news article said, “God prevails in lawsuit!” A man had blamed God for a lack of justice in his life, particularly in a battle with a steel company. He also wanted God to give him his youth back, grant him the ability to play a guitar, and resurrect his mother and his pet pigeon. The court tossed the case out. Strange how God seems never to deliver on our demands, our dreams, nor sometimes even on our simple requests. Yet, when God offers us something for free, isn’t it equally strange how we turn our backs on the gift?
Grace notes–a composer adds little dots to a score, gratuities that add beauty making the music more than the mundane. The word grace in Greek means “rejoice, I am glad.” The composer of life has added beauty and freedom beyond imagining and we ignore it because we are grounded in our routines, unable to believe life could be so beautiful.
A four year old was saying his prayers, “Forgive us our trash as we forgive those who put their trash in our baskets.” Another was misbehaving and was sent to his room. Later, as his mother tucked him into bed, he asked if she would hear his prayers. “It would be very nice if you asked God to help you be good,” said the mother. “Oh, I just want God to help you put up with me,” said the boy. That’s grace! So easily captured by children but as we grow, we seem to have a hard time with it.
A religious person had invited Jesus to dinner. There was a woman with a bad reputation who showed up with a jar full of expensive perfume. She knelt at the feet of Jesus, wetting them with her tears, and then she poured the perfume on them. You can almost smell the aroma, it’s overpowering as it fills the room like the scent of flowers in a funeral parlor.
Nice story of extravagant faith, but if Jesus was who they said he was, shouldn’t he have known about that woman’s reputation? Others in the room knew her well and began to protest. Jesus motioned to his host to listen to a story. “There were these two guys who owed money,” he said, “one was really in hock, the other not quite so much. The loan shark let them both off the hook rather than break their legs. Which one do you think was happier?”
Simon was all ears. He was trying to be a polite host. The answer was obvious, the one who owed the most. Right! “So now Simon, take a look at this woman who has just washed my feet with her tears and filled the room with perfume.” Suddenly the soft underbelly of hypocrisy is exposed. Right in the middle of a shameful exhibition of affection comes the question, is not our capacity to love directly equated to our understanding of how much we are loved?
No social amenities only extravagant, unconditional, grace-filled love. Like the woman who sat in my office a number of years back and asked poignantly, “How can I ever forgive myself?” “You can’t,” I said, “but God already has.”
Yet, that isn’t the end of the account. The camera recedes to a wide angle and there sits the astonished dinner guests. They whisper, “Who is this who forgives the sins of such a woman?” They were no doubt good upstanding citizens, probably friends of Simon’s who were embarrassed for their host. Maybe they were fellow church members.
There is an old film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep called “Ironweed.” The two stumble across an old drunken Eskimo lying in the snow. “Is she drunk or a bum?” asks Nicholson. “Just a bum, been here all her life,” says Streep. “And before that?” “She was a whore.” “She hasn’t been a whore all her life. Before that?” “ I dunno. Just a little kid I guess.” “ Well, a little kid is something. It’s not a bum and it’s not a whore so let’s take her in.” Nicholson and Streep are looking through the lens of grace, seeing what God sees, a little kid, a child created in God’s image no matter how defaced the image has become.
Too often, the church doesn’t see it that way today. One Sunday a little tyke was turning and smiling at everyone around. He wasn’t making noise or playing with the hymnals, just smiling. After a while the mother jerked him into his seat and whispered loud enough for God and those nearby to hear, “Stop that grinning, you’re in church!” As tears started down the child’s cheeks, she added, “That’s better!” and returned to her prayers. I thought of that story the other night at our Presbytery meeting when folks were once again talking about who was acceptable and who was not in the church. Thielicke wrote, “The devil succeeds in laying his cuckoo eggs in a pious nest.” The dinner guests murmured, “Who is this who forgives such sins?”
You have to marvel at Jesus’ ability to move with ease among outsiders. Those who are condemned, rejected, seen as different and unacceptable, those turned away by the “good folk.” Maybe Jesus spent so much time with them because he preferred their company. Not that they were any better than the rest of us, maybe they were just honest in who they were, no pretense. Let us not forget that it was the good folk who did Jesus in, in the end.
Back when Mt. St. Helens erupted with its massive destruction, heat literally melting the soil, everything was covered with ash. Scientists wondered how long it would be before the land could ever sustain life again. One day a park ranger was surprised to come across a small patch of wild flowers and grasses growing in an isolated spot surrounded by barren earth. It took him a while to notice that the green spot was in the shape of an elk. From that point on scientists knew that wherever they found patches of green it was the result of the remains of a fallen animal.
Our fallen world too often seems to be decaying. One perspective is to condemn, criticize, and decry the evils of our time, to assume it may never sustain abundant life again, but there is a different “moral capital” we can draw from if we choose. We can, in the midst of our culture that so often resembles the landscape of Mt. St. Helens, begin to stumble upon green patches, and when we do, we can believe that they eventually will become woven together making life lush and beautiful again. We can believe that because we follow a loving God of grace rather than a God of judgment and orthodox rules. We can believe that because we follow a God that creates all things new. We can believe that because we follow a God of resurrections.
It was a dark time before people like William Wilberforce were elected to British Parliament. People who devoted their lives to ending slavery, eliminating debtor’s prison and child labor and starting public housing and education for every child. During that same period William Booth strolled through the slums of London and decided to open a mission he called “The Salvation Army.” A lot of good, religious folk condemned the efforts of both men, but both persisted against all odds. Booth even called his outcasts “trophies of grace.”
In the 70s, I would occasionally worship in a place called “Wayfarers Chapel.” It was part of East Liberty Church in Pittsburgh. We had proposed that Wayfarers might be used as a soup kitchen during the week. The problem was, that chapel was where some members received communion. I recall one service when Elsie, a prostitute too old to practice her trade any longer, was standing in line when the minister said, “The body of Christ broken for you.” There stood Malcolm, a young black man ready to pick a fight with anyone who looked at him. “The body of Christ broken for you.” There was Sam and his wife who had just learned their son had been one more youngster sacrificed to the God’s of war. “The body of Christ broken for you.” Standing next to them was Susan, a militant antiwar protester. “The body of Christ broken for you.” There stood one of the most respected surgeons in the nation. There stood a stockbroker not far from a dowager who had decided to give a bundle of money to refurbish housing. Then there was an adulterer and his girlfriend, and a gay couple, a college professor, and a young minister. All of us covered with the ash and decay, the debris of living. “The body of Christ broken for you.”
The congregation decided it would be a good place for a soup kitchen. Street people being fed where the rest of us had been fed. “The body of Christ, the Lord’s table, a great banquet.” Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is not because of who we are. It is the message our frightened world longs to hear.
Bill Moyer made a documentary a few years back that I still like to watch. There is a scene in Wembley Stadium, London. The people are celebrating the end of South Africa’s apartheid government, something that at times no one thought would ever happen. Twelve hours of rock music by groups like “Guns and Roses” have blasted the air and the audience. Booze and bodies are everywhere.
The commentary cuts back and forth from the raucous crowd to an interview with opera singer Jessye Norman. Why she is present, no one seems to know. During the interview, she talks about the hymn “Amazing Grace,” which is the title of Moyer’s documentary. It’s noted that it was written by that slave ship captain turned minister, John Newton. The tune was probably borrowed from a melody first sung by slaves chained in the hull of his ship. Perhaps he redeemed the song as he sought to redeem his own life.
You can’t help but feel the confluence as Norman walks on to the stage. A single light shines on her, no back-up band, a restless and noisy crowd chanting for more rock music, and things start to get ugly as she slowly begins to sing. Her rolling tones carry the words, “how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now....” Seventy thousand people grow silent. By the time she reaches the last verse everyone has reached back into memories long forgotten and have begun to sing along. “When we’ve been here ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.” When she finishes not a sound can be heard.
Patches of green, our world, our frightened, accusing, judging, world thirsts for grace. It was the world that Jesus entered, greeted that day with branches and garments waving. It is the world some are deathly afraid of when finally we glimpse one of those green patches and the world falls silent before its beauty. Its fragrance fills the room. “The body of Christ broken for you.” Broken for every single person because God doesn’t want our rules and God doesn’t even want our cheers. God simply wants us to be quiet so that we can hear God say, “I love you.”
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