SERMONS
Sean Gilbert – 19/7/09 - Christ
Church
Ephesians 2:8-21
I know I wasn’t
alone thinking that a truly memorable moment of last week’s worship was
Ken’s introduction to our Prayers, in particular his sensitive and fitting
use of the Leonard Cohen lyric quote:
“Ring
the bells that can still ring
forget
your perfect offering
There’s
a crack, a crack in everything,
that’s
how the light gets in...”
On one level we know it, we feel it, we welcome it, and yet on another we still
fight like crazy against it. Pressures within, expectations without, that would
still have us produce the perfect offering, however impossible it may be.
“Forget it”, says Leonard Cohen, abandon it, flee from it proclaims
the Christian gospel.
I read recently – I’m
not sure where now – that religion is for those seeking a fast-track to
heaven, while the spiritual life is for those emerging from hell. Meaning, I
think, that our authentic spiritual experience - that place of meeting with the
Divine – is not in any way removed from deep and cruel human realities:
suffering, injustice, breakdown, depression, betrayal, catastrophe... just to
mention a few! There’s a crack in everything, yet it is at the point, within
the crucible of human experience, through much emptiness and despair, that the
grace of God or the healing light of God, is most penetrative, alive and operative.
In the well-known words of T.S. Eliot:
The wounded
surgeon plies the steel
that questions
the distempered part;
beneath
the bleeding hands we feel,
the sharp
compassion of the healer’s art
resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
This is no self-help or “how to” mantra, is it? For it is not about
climbing out of it ourselves, or girding one’s loins or being self-reliant;
no, it is a radical, if not unnerving sense of surrender and trust; Holding up
to the wounded healer the wound itself.
“For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not
your own doing; it is the gift of God –not the result of works,
so that no- one may boast.”
I had the
pleasure of attending a breakfast on Thursday where Rev Steve Koski – back
for the 150th anniversary of Brougham Place – gave one of his wonderful
motivational addresses. I was delighted (and told him so) about the growth
I saw in him. By his own later admission, he was no longer the man with all
the snappy and sure-fire answers teaching how to live a successful life, but
someone, because of his own life sufferings, who now speaks from a place of
vulnerability and communality. “I’m not telling you anything you
don’t already know”, he said, “I’m just perhaps unearthing
it a little more for you. I wouldn’t have said that 10 years ago.”
The
message of grace, the wonderment of grace is always in need of rediscovery
and unearthing a little more. Particularly those of us long conditioned
by church and society that perfection was not only attainable if we
worked long and hard enough at it, but virtuous to boot. A potent mix,
in anyone’s experience.
You know,
I cannot think of a greater barrier to the ways of grace, to the healing nature
of grace (to God in fact) than human will set like flint in morality and so
called virtuosity or self-righteousness. That being, b ecause it is always
someone else in need of grace, not themselves; someone always less fortunate
or less moral who truly needs God.
Well, I
want to say unequivocally, and from first-hand knowledge, there is a crack,
a crack in everybody and everything. And I want to say it with no small amount
of gratitude, relief and release, thanks be to God! Because the discovery
of grace is like throwing off of the straight jacket, a coming home even in
rags, poverty and shame, to the embrace of acceptance, belief, forgiveness
and empowerment for renewed life.
Those who
don’t get this, nor want it for themselves, will probably complain and
point long and accusing fingers, having no idea of the life experience and
pain that has brought a pilgrim to this point, but it doesn’t matter;
it doesn’t matter! The lost is found, the divided is made whole,
the circle complete, the alien (or the alienated) is now the son or the daughter
in the fullest and most beautiful way possible. We are simply but surely embraced
for the living, and to steal a Kevin Ruddism, “and do you know why”,
so we might fully embrace each other, reaching out to the world in a spirit
of understanding, wisdom, kindness and compassion.
Paul Tillich
once wrote that the greatest problem facing the Protestant church was the idol
it had made of its own goodness and virtue, and he wasn’t saying “sin
with a grin”, as I read recently, but what he was saying, ala Leonard
Cohen was, forget the perfection nonsense, rather gladly allow the grace of
God to shine through the imperfections, the absurdities and inconsistencies
that we all are.
Or in the words of Rumi whom I quoted earlier in the year: “Be
helpless, be dumbfounded and then the stretcher from grace will come
to carry you home...”
As human
beings we have much to let go of, much to yield to, yet open to the generous
and gracious embrace of God, to the love of the community, and the hope for
a renewed world. The bell will ring, cracks ‘n all.
To conclude,
a prayer and the timeless wisdom of Michael Leunig:
“When
the heart is cut or cracked and broken
Do not
clutch it
let
the wound lie open
let
the wind
From
the good old sea blow in
to
bathe the wound with salt
And let it sting.
let a stray dog lick it
let a bird lean in the hole and sing
A simple song like a tiny bell
And let it ring.”
