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“No Exceptions” A Worship Service by the Reverend Mark W. Christian Presented to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City Sunday November 6, 2005
Reading From “Natural Grace” Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake Grace is about gifts. Grace is unconditional love. Grace therefore is about blessing because blessing is the theological word for goodness, and a gift is presumably something good. A grace is something good, it’s a blessing, a gift. So when I use the term original blessing, you can just as easily use the term original grace. The Universe has been a blessing and a grace for fifteen billion years. The amazing drama which has brought this planet to its presence and our species to its presence and all the other species we share the planet with - it all took fifteen billion years of decision making on the part of the Universe-and it was all grace. It was unconditional love. None of us had to prove our right to be here for the original fireball to come up with the right temperature and the right rate of expansion within one-millionth of one-millionth of a second for us to be here. It’s what the mystic Julian of Norwich said in the 15th century, “We have been loved before the beginning.” That’s grace-it’s unconditional love.
Prayer and Meditation "Praise Song" Barbara Crooker Praise the light of late
November,
“No Exceptions” A Worship Service by the Reverend Mark W. Christian Presented to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City Sunday November 6, 2005 Last spring is when I know I noticed it. “It” has been around longer than that—but sometimes I don’t pay enough, or the right kind, of attention. Linda and I were on a trip back to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where I served a church before being called to minister here. We traveled about investigating old haunts and looking up friends and church members. We drove about four or five miles out of town—US 70 straining the car’s engine as we drove up the steep incline of the mesa that gives birth to the Organ Mountains. Soon the tires crunched on the red gravel driveway at Cliff Pelton’s house. Cliff is a retired civil engineer—he and his wife Mary live half of the year in New Mexico and half of the year at Mary’s family home on the shore of Lake Champlain near Burlington, Vermont. We pulled into the driveway and I saw it—it was a bumper sticker carefully centered on Cliff’s car that read: “God Bless the World—No Exceptions.” I was caught first by the “G” word on Cliff’s car. Through many conversations I had come to understand Cliff as a pretty secular kind of guy. He is an engineer, after all. I decided his wife Mary, an old style New England Unitarian might be behind the Mylar message. After a bit of pondering about the messenger, the message began to work on me: “God Bless the World—No Exceptions.” It’s cultural, social and political timeliness struck me. Its simple but ample request struck me. It’s universality struck me. “God Bless the World—No Exceptions.” That bumper sticker re-enters my consciousness late last summer as I am preparing my preaching schedule for the year. One of the things that I try do with my sermons is to coordinate them with the monthly themes we use in QUUEST—our newish approach to Lifespan Faith Development. We have been using QUUEST for a year, or so, now. It sets theme for the month—which is explored using a variety of learning modalities. Our children explore these themes in their classes. Some of our Covenant Groups focus on them. Jonalu writes about them in our newsletter. We share a QUUEST story in our service like we did today. I also use it as a focal point for one or more of the sermons that I preach that month. Sometimes I make it clear that the sermon is about the QUUEST theme, and sometimes I just slip it in. We can be tricky that way! The October theme was Loss and Grief—so last week’s sermon drawing on All Souls Day, remembering those who have died was a natural connecting point. The theme we chose for November is Grace. As I was cataloguing the things that might give homiletic entry to Grace—“It” came back to me. Cliff’s bumper sticker snagged in my imagination. “God Bless the World—No Exceptions.” I’ll come back to that but first I think I should spend a bit of time talking about Grace and why I think it’s important enough to be the focal point for the whole church this month. I know that I have received some odd looks from more than a few of you when you have greeted me with the question, “How are you doing?” and heard my somewhat odd reply, “Better than I deserve.” There is an element of a prankster answering a standard question in a non-standard manner in that reply. Non-sequitur answers make us consciously reflect on the things we otherwise do by rote. There is a bit of ego control in my answer—“Better than I deserve” reminds me that I am not as important as I sometimes think myself to be. The real value of that reply, though, comes when I respond to the curious look I elicit by adding—“That just means I believe in Grace.” I recently had this kind of exchange with my colleague Robin Meyers from Mayflower Congregational Church. When I said that “Better than I deserve” points me toward Grace he commented, “I didn’t know Unitarians believed in Grace.” “ I’m not sure we do,” I replied, “but I’m trying.” Grace is not something that we often talk about—but I am convinced that it is deep in our institutional DNA. We may have to look for it but I promise you it’s there. Grace is one of those terms, along side God and Faith, that tends to make many among us uneasy. We hear it used mostly by people we don’t agree with spiritually so we avoid it. Our hymnal includes the classic “Amazing Grace” but I’ll admit that there have been times that I wondered why it’s there. Particularly that line, “And saved a wretch like me,” made me bristle. I don’t think I’m alone in that. Apparently enough of us bristle that a footnote is tagged to the hymn indicating that it’s OK to replace “Wretch” with “Soul.” Yeah, like Unitarians need permission to change a word here or there! My tension with that song, and our reluctance to embrace Grace is ill founded. It is like deciding that since a misguided church like the one that Fred Phelps leads in Kansas uses current events that we shouldn’t use the events of the world to further our church’s mission. Phelps’ church is the one that recently held an anti-gay rights protest at the funeral of an Oklahoma City soldier who was apparently neither gay nor an ally of the gay community. The logic behind abandoning religious concepts because others put them to ends we don’t agree with is flawed and fallacious—pure and simple. We must stop being afraid of words because others use them differently than we do. Grace has grown on me. It is really a simple notion—a useful one, I think. Grace is something that is very much in harmony with our theology. Grace, at its most basic level, is unearned goodness. To believe in Grace is simply to acknowledge that there is goodness in the world that was not created by, or owed to, us. Matthew Fox said it well in our reading… The amazing drama which has brought this planet to its presence and our species to its presence and all the other species we share the planet with … was all grace. …None of us had to prove our right to be here for the original fireball to come up with the right temperature and the right rate of expansion within one-millionth of one-millionth of a second for us to be here. If we aren’t owed the moment of creation—how can our fundamental existence be seen as anything less than Grace. I used to say that Grace was “Undeserved Goodness” but I have come to modify that a bit. Asserting our deservedness, or lack there of, really only complicates the matter. It doesn’t matter whether or not we believe we are worthy of Goodness. We all encounter Goodness that comes to us unbidden. That unbidden, unearned, Goodness is Grace. Grace is part of what we gather to acknowledge in our worship and fellowship. When Jonalu or I say each week that this day we have been given is a gift—we point toward Grace. Gifts, if they really are gifts, cannot be earned or expected. That is recompense, payment—which while good and useful—is something very different from a gift—very different from Grace. I will admit that it’s easy for me, at times, to believe I deserve every good thing that happens to me. This kind of hubris, I have slowly learned, is the “Pride that goeth before a fall.” I believe we have to understand that a big part of a life is mystery. It is a mystery which we can neither dictate, control nor anticipate. What does this Grace look like in our lives? That is kind of like asking what does air feel like to our lungs. For me, the fact we are alive is the first sign of Grace. None of us did anything that caused our birth. Set aside the question of when, where and to whom we were born, no religion I know of—maintains we caused our own birth. Even the Hindu concept of reincarnation, while maintaining that our actions effect our rebirth, doesn’t maintain that the individual has a causal relationship to the primal act of their creation. That is what I like so much about the story we shared with the kids this morning. The first creation story from Genesis makes it very clear that we didn’t bring about creation. We didn’t form the earth or the sun or the moon or the plants or any of the fish that swim, birds that fly or animals that walk. We didn’t co-create anything. We are created. Everything was created before we got here. Even more importantly, each step in that story is accompanied with a kind of commentary—“And God saw that it was good.” It is not our doing. It is good. That is Grace. One of the tricks to living is learning to appreciate the gift of creation. Learning to recognize and appreciate Grace is one of life’s more important lessons. More than that, though, I believe that Genesis story calls on us to participate in Grace. We are called to reciprocate Grace. None of this is as easy as it sounds. It is far too easy to follow a false path in that story and simply see ourselves as consumers of creation—acting as though we alone are owed the bounty of the earth and the beauty of creation. That creation story actually charges us with that kind of reciprocal responsibility for the gifts of creation. The story says we are given dominion over all these things—the plants, the animals, all that is. “Dominion” can cast a very utilitarian shadow which is not always good. We are charged with putting all of creation to use. Make no mistake that is how we have behaved following that divine command—often with disastrous results. Dominion, though, includes slightly different possibility, though. To have dominion is not only to be free to control; it is to be held responsible and accountable. Our Dominion means we are responsible and accountable not only for our actions but for the very things that have been entrusted to us. We aren’t owed the goodness of creation. We are entrusted with its care and allowed to reap its abundance. We are, therefore, called to be stewards—not simply consumers—of creation. We are called to make certain that all the rest of creation can share in the gift of goodness which has been graced to us. That is the reciprocal responsibility we accept along with the gift that is given unbidden. It is in this kind of awareness that we are called to participate and reciprocate Grace. Now to be certain, there are many things which come our way unbidden and unearned that are not Grace. There is much that we would prefer to have never known or felt or experienced. War, pain, fear, hunger, anger, love un-returned, hopes thwarted, dreams perverted, meanness offered in the place of compassion—these things are as real as unbidden Goodness. Acknowledging that Life is Gift and that Grace exists doesn’t mean that everything that happens is good. I wish it could be that way, but it can’t. A simple fact underlying this is that living doesn’t end with creation. It starts there. The nature of creation as Good stands in tension with much that happens after that and sometimes the religious task is to get back to the primordial Grace. My theology would be shallow and disastrous if I didn’t acknowledge that Evil exists and sometimes comes to us unbidden—just like Grace. The Taoists might say that Good and Evil interdepend in creation. The things we earn and are owed also interdepend with the things we don’t. It is natural—it is human—for us to draw our lines of causality and entitlement. To take credit and affix blame is a natural instinct. The truth is that it really isn’t that simple. In the same way that we don’t earn every good that comes to us, not every evil is created by our actions, either. We aren’t owed everything—and everything isn’t our fault. My message today is that the Spirit calls us into an awareness that life includes more than a secular, linear, understanding of events. That brings me back around to the bumper sticker I saw on Cliff Pelton’s truck. “God Bless the World—No Exceptions.” The universality, the non-conditional nature of that plea—that prayer—echoes the ubiquitous nature of Grace. I don’t think we can identify what is the gift from what isn’t when it comes to Grace. Our response, our proper response, then is to live our lives erring on the side of goodness, hope and mercy. Grace is the blessing that flows through our lives. We can rightly respond by helping the blessing flow through us and on to the rest of creation. I believe that is the prayer and task of our lives. Not only are we to call on God to Bless the Whole World. We are called on to treat it as blessed. We are called to participate in that blessing. Each in our own ways, as the gifts are given to us, are called to further the blessing. That is the reciprocity that Grace demands of us, “No Exceptions.” AMEN
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