The other day I experienced the most pedestrian version of
grace in my life.
I walked out of the gym, and there on the bush next to my
car in the parking lot, was a damp, one dollar bill. Just laying there, on the
bush.
Damp…in Modesto.
Often the Universe offers me lessons during the week that
make my task of writing a sermon easier. There was the time when I wrote a
sermon on compassion, and that week I found a puppy who needed rescuing in the
alley.
There was the week that I talked about living an engaged
religious life, and struggling with just what to do when a person on the street
asks me for money. Wouldn’t you know it, that three times I was asked for money
that week and twice after, as if the Universe was saying to me “So, now that
you’ve talked about this, are you going to actually DO it?”
This week, though, a dollar bill on a bush.
Not a burning bush, mind you, so don’t get nervous.
Just an average, run of the mill bush that lives it’s life
suffering in what is undoubtedly a very hot parking lot for in the summer.
What kind of meaning am I supposed to make out of that, I
ask you.
I don’t know if you know this, but here at the Fellowship we
have a small group ministry program. In this program a group of no more than 12
people gather monthly to discuss, deeply, a theme. In Modesto there is a facilitator’s
group, and each of us is responsible for finding or developing that month’s
theme. And then each small group does the theme.
This month, Marcia G. was in charge of the lesson. On
the day of the Facilitator’s Group, she called me in a state of panic. “I don't
know what to do with Grace! I grew up a Universalist! I know nothing of this
whole topic! Why did you pick it!?”
Marcia demonstrates quite nicely, and colorfully, the problem
that Unitarian Universalists have with Grace. We don’t know what to do with it.
Of course, I told Marcia that I had every confidence in her
ability to wrestle successfully with the topic, and of course, she came through
with shining colors.
She also, by the way, took some of the best material to use,
so that I now feel like I can’t use it, too.
For that I’m both grateful to her for her work, and a little
flummoxed.
What do we do about Grace?
When most people encounter the world Grace, thoughts turn to
phrases like “being in God’s good graces” or “therefore but for the Grace of
God go I.”
These aren’t always useful for us.
Some of have an immediate reaction to such phrases, and it’s
no mystery as to why.
Aside from personal complex histories with churches and
people who may utter these phrases with some regularity, we have an
institutional reason for struggling with them.
As I like to remind you with some frequency, our Unitarian
and even Universalist history comes out of the Puritan church. This is true in
both England and the United States. The Puritans were Calvinists.
They followed the teachings of John Calvin, who lived from
1509-1564. One of the main tenants of Calvinism is that God has an “elect” of
people who are saved from eternal damnation. One cannot earn a place in heaven,
or heaven forbid as the Catholic’s believed “buy a place in heaven.” These
people are known to God, and only suspected by themselves. It is only through God’s generosity that one
either is or is not in “God’s good graces.”
You can, perhaps easily see, why this did not sit well with
our early Unitarians and Universalists. Firstly, early Universalist doctrine
was of course, that there was universal salvation. The name says it all
“Universalists”: no damnation, no Hell.
The Unitarians have long believed in salvation by character
alone. Unitarianism in America "reacted against Calvinistic doctrines that
emphasized human sinfulness, as well as the Trinity. Unitarians argued that
such doctrines were inconsistent with the Bible and contrary to reason"[1]
It is easy to see that while these two faiths were separate,
neither had any use for the Calvinistic Predestination.
And yet, some 200+ years after our departure from Orthodox
Puritanism began in earnest, still we struggle with this concept of Grace.
So what if we step away from the idea that Grace only comes
from a God we may or may not believe in?
In the past I have quoted the Rev. Dr. Bill Sinkford when he
said “we are all humanists in that we know that we have only human hands to
rely on to improve the world.” I think of this not as atheism as much as I
think of it as an Enlightenment Era definition of humanism.
In the Reading from the Global Scripture today, Anne Lamott
tells a story of humans conferring grace on other humans.
In her touching story, we can see a young, unmarried woman,
who is at the end of her rope, and pregnant. This is not an unfamiliar story,
nor, I want to be clear, is this a person who should in any way feel shame or
be abused. But still she is alone in the
world, and vulnerable.
What today’s reading couldn’t encompass because the story is
elsewhere in the book Traveling Mercies
from which the reading was extracted, Anne is new to church life. This idea of
a spiritual community was new to her then. She didn’t really “get it.”
So this may seem all the more miraculous to her, if you know
more about the context.
I particularly am fond of the imagery of the little elderly
black woman, Mary Williams, putting dimes in a little baggy with the twist tie.
There is something so maternal, so grandmotherly, in that.
And we, perhaps, we can hear this story, and think, oh,
that’s so sweet of them. And it was.
Incredibly generous.
We can hear this story and it’s a nice story, not too
challenging…and it feels like a kind of a triumph of the human spirit story.
But it isn’t.
Anne is, by many ways of measuring, better off than the
little old church ladies who help her. She is college educated. She is lighter
skinned, perhaps, and I didn’t look this up but I have seen pictures of her,
Euro-American.
What makes this story not just nice, but germane to our
struggle with grace is the last few lines.
She was deeply grateful for their many kindnesses to her, but it’s the
final sentences I want us to look at closely:
I was usually filled with a sense
of something like shame until I’d remember that wonderful line of Blake’s—that
we are here to learn to endure the beams of love—and I would take a long deep
breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: “Thank you.”[2]
We are here to learn to endure the beams of love, and say,
sometimes in a voice deep and husky with emotion, to say “Thank you.”
This accepting the kindness of others is not an easy thing
for Unitarian Universalists. Helping others? Oh, we have that down pat.
Need someone to fight for Marriage Equality?
We got it!
Need a church to host a meeting about Water Justice?
C’mon in!
Need people to go out and be an ally for …..fill in the
social cause here…
Sign us up!
But to be on the other end of that? This makes us squirm.
Along with many other “genetic” gifts we have leftover from our puritan
ancestors, is a very strong work ethic.
To offer help to those who need it, this is the right thing
to do. The just thing to do.
But on some level if we, with all of our advantages,
privileges and positions, if we require help, than it can only be because we
have somehow failed to be a success.
And here’s where Grace comes in.
Grace is offered, but it is not complete until it is humbly
accepted.
So this is the challenging part to us. How can we accept
help, when we’ve done nothing to earn it? And how can we, through a throat
tightened by emotion and gratitude simple say “thank you”?
Part of the answer lies in Universalism, part in Unitarian
Universalism.
Our Universalist forebears taught the world that each person
is loved by God and thereby lovable to all. No person is beyond redemption,
even if they sometimes irritate us.
As a Unitarian Universalist congregation, we have, along
with 1,600 other congregations in the United States, agreed to Affirm and
promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.
This, awkward as it may seem, includes us.
A gracious host gives their guests what they need, but doesn’t crowd them. And when I think about a gracious guest, it’s one who arrives knowing the imposition they’re making. But with each it’s this acknowledgement, the biggest part of the graciousness is to acknowledge that they are there for each other. – Rev. Denis Paul
You can see by way of Denis’s quote that there is a dance to
grace and graciousness. The generosity is the easy part for us. The small
gesture—or the grand gesture—depending on the interaction.
The struggle for us is the humble acceptance of a gift that
we do not deserve. The challenge is to receive grace without feeling the need
to explain ourselves, to know that this act of kindness is just that, an act of
kindness. It is not a judgment, not blaming, not a pointing out of your own
moral failings.
By definition, an act of grace is undeserved. An act of
grace is not a response to something you did, or did not do. It is an act of
kindness, a gift, a blessing.
I have been shown grace many times in my life, and mostly
they have been acts of grace by other humans. A kind word when desperately
needed. A soft hand on the shoulder when I needed to be heard; a free lunch
just because.
I, too, have had to learn to say Thank You. Lest you think
that I stand up here an expert, let me confess to you that I have not mastered
the art and skill of it.
Try to think of grace not as a gift from God-on-high, but
think of grace as closer to the ground. If we can do that, perhaps grace won’t
seem to big and complex and otherworldly. Then we can see grace for what it
truly is: all around us, in between and among us.
Next time the universe, in the form of a friend offering you
a ride, a dog asking to play ball, a kindly smile as you go about your day…the
next time grace shows up in your life, I ask you to step into that grace, to
whisper, if you cannot say it aloud, Thank You.
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