Sermons by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
God's gift of mercy
Loving People into Transformation
Sermon by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
St Luke’s Day, 2002
Diocesan ConventionMy St. Luke’s Day question is this: Where did you first experience — not talk about, but experience — total mercy? I’ll share a story to get us started.
I went to college back in the Pleistocene era, when colleges had attendance policies — if you cut enough classes you flunked. So I had this totally adolescent scam going: cut classes but study hard for tests and present the authority figure with an interesting paradox — how do you flunk a kid who has aced the test? I mostly got away with it. My silly little game was a great hobby: it mixed arrogance, defiance, and a high element of risk without having to buy special equipment.
The time came when I did not ace the test. The adolescent scam broke down, as they all do eventually. To make things much worse, it was a course I needed to graduate.
Carl Weidman, now dead many years, sat me down. I was ready for him, armed with the usual excuses, evasions, and absurd posturing that folks who are caught but don’t want to admit it bring to such discussions.
Before I could start the offense, defense, and o-ffense, he talked to me about the pain I had caused him and myself. He said he wouldn’t participate in my neurotic and self-destructive behavior. Finally, he told me that, as annoying as I was, I had utterly failed to make him stop loving me. He actually said the words, “I forgive you.” For the first time in my life those words and the speaker’s attitude were so< thoroughly congruent that I was speechless.
So much for Holden Caulfield. I was out-foxed by a cunning love that saw in me something worth saving, saving from myself. It was the 60s, remember — like many other adolescents, I needed to demonstrate that authorities were tyrants, fakes, and irrelevant. It always tugs at my heart when I meet folks still trapped back in that world of pointless defiance. Anyway, this man reached across the chasm that my earnestly silly behavior had created, and embraced me when I was determined to be unlovable. So I did sit and eat. To this day I cannot look at a line of Greek without thinking of a man who loved me when that was the last thing I deserved or wanted, fool that I was.
The interesting thing about this story is that if this hadn’t happened this way and if he had let me realize my ambition to be excused from my vocation, I wouldn’t be here today. Whether that adds anything pleasant to my teacher’s enjoyment of eternity or not cannot yet be known.
There is a point to this stroll down memory lane. In his gospel and in his early church history we call the Acts of the Apostles, St. Luke made this point about the gift of mercy until his readers had it coming out of their ears. His is the gospel with the lost coin, the lost sheep, the Prodigal Son. He tells us of the wildly revolutionary song of Mary, the inclusion of women, Gentiles and outcasts as first-class citizens in the realm of God. Luke shows us a Jesus who does not break laws but transcends them, and comes to people on a level totally untouched by normal human distinctions.
This wasn’t just an exercise in creative theology for a doctor with a flair for writing. Luke wrote to a church of middle-class or better believers, most of them Gentiles, who were finding it getting tough to be a Christian. Would the God who let Jerusalem be destroyed out from under the chosen people keep promises to Gentiles-come-lately like them? Was it worth it to continue to pour money into a church where people fought with each other from day one? There were religions around that were easier to understand and didn’t involve so much risk, so much uncertainty, so much parting with cash.
Luke, a healer, doesn’t lecture his audience — a good doctor knows that you don’t change people by insulting them. This was a truth that the professor who was savior of my adolescent self also knew in 1967. He was, therefore, much gentler to me than I could possibly have deserved.
Luke heals his by telling stories. People could see for themselves that God can be counted on for two things: God could be counted on to keep the promises; God could be counted on to do that in ways we would never expect, but ways that introduce us to the power of the Holy Spirit. It is a strange paradox that to overly explain a story is to ruin it. Of all the evangelists, St. Luke invites us to think in the wonderful world of stories where the mind can wander freely in the realm of the Holy Spirit.
To a Church worried that the institution was dead or dying because people quarreled, Luke behaves in an interesting way. He doesn’t cover up squabbles, he doesn’t hide misbehavior. The Book of Acts shows us St. Paul, Barnabas, John Mark, and so on, in their least attractive moments, but it also shows them at their best. Without preaching about it, Luke shows us a Church of very fallible mortals spreading from Jerusalem to Rome -- spreading because, thank God, God works through jerks.
I steal that line from a tenth grader (who is now about 45) who summed up what I thought was my brilliant lecture on the history of the patriarchs with those four words: God works through jerks.
St Luke holds out to us in 2002 the same message he held out in the shaky decade between AD 70 and 80 when he wrote: God loves us no matter who we are, takes us as we are, and shows us things we would never imagine, and acts through us, of all people. If we let God do it, we can be instruments of the most surprising peace, joy, and transformation in the lives of those around us. Oh, and we can also find a way to transcend the fighting that religious people seem to thrive on. If we want to. If we want to. Doesn’t Jesus somewhere ask, “Do you want to be healed?”
I asked you to think about your story, about your first powerful experience of grace. Luke the physician and evangelist wants us to cherish those stories as real life applications of the big story that God tells in the word made flesh, Jesus Christ.
I told you that embarrassing story about my youth to encourage you to look at your life for signs of the grace that perhaps you did not even wish to receive, but that changed your life anyway. As we recognize the moments and people around us who restore and support us, it is just that much more difficult to believe that we are orphans in a hostile world.
Like Luke’s original audience, we mainline Christians are frightened by violence and destruction in the world. We worry about the future. We are frankly worried about whether belonging to the mainstream church makes any sense: after all, it is the churches of easy answers and entertaining "worship-experiences" that are growing the fastest.
Luke invites us to look at the data all over again. To celebrate St. Luke is to look at the story of Jesus and the story of the early church and there to see ourselves. To see ourselves not as weak imitations of pedestal-dwelling saints, but to see ourselves as very much like the people who found acceptance, healing, and grace in Jesus Christ and passed that gift on to those around them.You know, being a rebel or a second-class citizen has its advantages: nobody expects much of you. Luke tells of people who are shown that they are first class and invited to live as though the Spirit could do something through them.
Luke’s characters fall victim to shipwreck, snakebite and backbite; they quarrel and they even preach totally ineffective sermons, as Paul did on the Areopagus or when he put poor Eutyches to sleep, almost permanently. One thing Luke’s characters never do, however, is mope about how unworthy or unlovely they are. That is not because they lived before Augustine, Luther, Freud, and Woody Allen. It is because they have seen how dependably God has provided constant witness that all human life is precious, redeemable, and useful. The have seen Jesus die and rise — for them.I wasn’t kidding about the grace-bearing professor being the reason I work in the Church. He gave me the course credit I needed to continue on in the clergy factory. Much more than that, he showed me that the old, old story of Jesus and his love is so very much more than words and bears repeating. And repeating.
As we all look through our lives this morning for the times when God has used people to make grace a reality that heals us, we know once again that we have great treasures to share. One way we can do that, if we read Luke correctly, is by seeking out and loving the most annoying people we know; then, watch what God will make of them... and us.
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