Here Is Your Life

Sermon

Last month, many of us mourned the death of Frederick Buechner, the famed Presbyterian pastor and author, but we were consoled that his words will outlive him and continue to inspire us. So in my next few sermons, you’ll hear something from Buechner that adds cohesion to the sermon. I hope!

Buechner once wrote, “The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.”

We’re going to talk about the grace of God today because that is what the writer of 1^st Timothy is getting at in our scripture lesson. And thinking about grace is all fine and good and gives you a nice warm feeling—until you think about what it really means. Because if grace is anything, it is terribly unfair.

Before we get into just how terribly unfair grace is, let’s look for just a moment at this letter called First Timothy. For a long time everyone thought that the apostle Paul wrote it because that’s how the letter starts—I, Paul, write this to Timothy. Nowadays scholars aren’t so sure that the real Paul wrote it, but rather someone else who admired the great apostle and took his name so as to give this letter some credibility. While we might call that wrong, it was an accepted practice back in the day.

First Timothy is considered one of the pastoral letters, along with 2^nd Timothy and Titus; letters written from a pastor’s heart with concern for the general community of Jesus followers. But whereas Paul’s real letters preach faith—having faith, strengthening faith—the pastoral letters are more about preserving the faith, giving the faith of Jesus followers some boundaries, defining what these believers believed in. (James Dunn, New Interpreters, p. 778)

A scholar named James Dunn notes that when this letter was written, this Jesus-follower thing was still new. When people gathered to worship Jesus, all the things that make a religion a religion were still so nebulous. There were no doctrinal arguments over an iota; no one cared if the choir wore robes or the acolytes wore tennis shoes. They were still figuring things out and tentatively setting some boundaries. As Dunn notes, “The process of definition… required a firm hand; otherwise the identity of the new movement would be dissipated.” (New Interpreters¸794)

The author of this letter is working to define for the community of Jesus-followers how grace is an essential, maybe the essential, component of their faith. In order to make his argument, he speaks of his own need for grace, having been the most terrible, horrible, no good, very bad sinner.

It feels a little forced, maybe, this guy’s confession. It feels artificial, a confession made for the sake of rhetoric and not the kind of thing that keeps you up at night, with guilt and remorse gnawing away at the lining of your stomach. “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, a man of violence.” It brings to mind every fallen televangelist exposed for their hypocrisy, every politician caught in a lie, every celebrity ruined by a hot mic.

Because let’s face it: there are bad people out there. People who break all sorts of laws, people who hurt other people, people who abuse power. The news leads with their stories every day, and we shake our heads and tsk-tsk our tongues when one more of the mighty has fallen.

But you and I, do we rank with these no-goodniks? The saying is true, the bigger they come the harder they fall, but what about us regular people? How bad is our bad? How much grace do we need?

It’s a hard thing to look at ourselves that way, to look at ourselves and admit, as we often say in our confession, the truth of our lives. For some, it’s really hard to admit that we hurt someone, or made a mistake, or did something wrong. Our pride gets in the way, sometimes; our egos put up some resistance; we don’t like that image in the mirror so we turn off the light and look somewhere else.

But some people know that it’s a good thing to admit the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of our lives. People who go through those Twelve Steps know it. People who engage regularly in confession as part of their prayer life know it. People who’ve realized they just can’t hold it in one more second know it.

They know it because they know the only way to grow is to learn from their mistakes, to learn from their sin, as we might say in church.

I don’t know if you’ve been aware of all the hubbub surrounding the remake of the musical Funny Girl on Broadway. Funny Girl is the story of Broadway star Fanny Brice, and the show was made famous by a stunning performance by a young Barbra Streisand in 1964. No one has dared remount this show in over 50 years—until this year. Long story short, the actress originally cast in the remake has left and has been replaced by another actress named Lea Michele.

Lea Michele came under fire a few years ago as stories emerged about her terrible behavior on set of the TV show that made her famous, Glee. For a few years no one would hire her. And now she’s starring in the reboot of Funny Girl on Broadway, an actress’s dream.

All this led to an article delving into the age-old question of whether those who’ve done wrong deserve a second chance. The author, Jessica Bennett, writes, “…we are… living in a peculiar time when we have competing cultural scripts. In one, we seem to have newfound empathy for people once vilified for their mistakes: Monica Lewinsky, Janet Jackson, Britney Spears…. Cultural blind spots can be blind spots because we don’t know what they are at the time. Yet when it comes to mistakes made in the present, it’s as though there’s a collective empathy gap. We seem to lack the hindsight or grace or maybe simply the distance to be open to forgiveness or the idea that somebody could earn it or even to give the benefit of the doubt.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/06/opinion/lea-michele-funny-girl-second-chances.html

And then Ms. Bennett comments, “I happen to believe that people should be able to make mistakes and learn from them, even when they should have known better. That it is possible to both hold people accountable and be open to the possibility of change. But they must also show that they have evolved.”

That is our pattern, as people of faith, because in ways we do and do not understand, God holds us accountable for the way we live our lives. We cheapen grace when we say that God lets us get away with anything; that is not divine grace at all. The truth is that God loves us no matter what, and if the realm of God looks something like a party, then as Fred Buechner suggested, that party is not complete without every single one of us.

But. But! Accepting the grace of God means living in the ways of God. Remember that the author of this letter is trying to give some boundaries, some shape for this thing that will become the Christian faith. Grace is one of the things that gives Christianity its shape, and so confession and forgiveness are part of it too. You can’t have grace if you don’t need it.

I don’t know about you, but during the silent prayer of confession I tend to say the same sort of thing each week. Gregg and I regularly admit to each other that on any particular day, we made Jesus cry, and by that we mean we did something that just isn’t right within the teachings of our faith. It is one thing to confess, a good thing; it is another to confess, to make amends, to learn and grow, all the while receiving grace.

I wish it were a linear thing, sin and grace and forgiveness, but it isn’t. Grace is not formulaic; it’s not the punchline in a three-point plan. We cannot manufacture grace nor can we ever fully understand it. All we can do is accept it and say thank you.

Which does not make up for the fact that grace is terribly unfair, that wretched people receive God’s love just as much as the blessed saints do. But it is God’s party, and as the host, God gets to manage the invite list.

Because if we are willing or even eager to accept God’s grace for ourselves and for those we love, then we must also be willing—or even eager—to accept that God’s grace is for those we cannot stand, we hate, we judge as irredeemable. And that makes us want to believe in justice more than grace.

If the apostle Paul, a former persecutor of Jesus-followers, were to receive justice, then on that road to Damascus he would have been struck dead by God, or permanently blinded, or robbed of his ability to speak. That would be God wreaking vengeance on this man who had so harmed the disciples of Jesus.

But God doesn’t do that. Instead, this persecutor of Jesus-followers, this Paul, gets a second chance. Yes, he is temporarily blinded, and yes, he is temporarily unable to speak, but God gives him the opportunity to turn from his former ways, to learn the ways of Jesus, and to become an extraordinary apostle. That is grace, and without it, we may never have heard of Jesus.

“The grace of God means something like this: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.” The invitation has been extended by a God who practices grace more than justice, and yes, that is unfair but also the best possible news. Who needs grace? Maybe you do.

And, truthfully, we all do.