Rough Treatment and Saving Grace
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on World Communion Sunday, October 7, 2007
at The First Parish in Lincoln
To listen to this sermon click here.
“As in nature, as in art, so in grace; it is rough treatment that gives souls, as well as stones, their luster.”
– Thomas Guthrie
READING:
1. Our reading this morning is a selection of verses from the 42nd and 43rd chapters of the book of Isaiah:
Thus says God the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and all that comes from it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it: “I have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. ... I will turn the darkness into light and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake you.
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned... for you are precious in my sight.” – Isaiah 42:5-6, 16, 43:2, 4
If you had a skeptical thought or two as you listened to me read those verses from Isaiah,
you’re not alone – in fact, you’re in fine company, because hard things happen every day,
sometimes right in front of our eyes, that would make even Mother Teresa
wonder whether God is really there for us – as, we know, she did.
Isaiah begins by giving us God’s resumé: the One who is about to speak to you is God the Lord,
“who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and all that comes from it,
who gives breath to its people and life to those who walk on it.”
Isaiah’s message is: listen up.
And what God says is beautiful – these verses literally embrace us:
“I will take hold of your hand.
I will turn the darkness into light and make the rough places smooth.
These are the things I will do; I will not forsake you.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned... for you are precious in my sight.”
These words are an old, divine promise: a covenant between God and all of humanity:
I will take hold of your hand; I will not forsake you...
But are there not times when God does forsake us? –
when it certainly feels as if God has forsaken us, or someone we love.
Jesus himself cried out on his dying day, “My God, my God, why have you... forsaken me?”
We know that when we walk through the fire, we will be burned.
And when the waters passed through New Orleans, they swept over people – many of them died.
Two weeks ago, a six-year-old girl died suddenly on a soccer field in Belmont.
Those verses in Isaiah are beautiful,
but if we don’t want to dismiss them as pure fantasy, what then are we to make of them?
They are about a covenant between God and all of humanity, but where was God in those situations?
A covenant in supposed to mean, “We’re in this together” – I do my part and you do your part.
Was Jesus, in the last hour of his life, thinking: I did my part – but now where are you?
Faith and doubt are lifelong companions.
They keep each other honest.
Our doubts keep our faith from being too easy, too glib.
Our faith keeps our doubts from dragging us all the way under.
And along the way, we all face situations that make us wonder: where was God in all this?
Which is why I was struck by the words I put on the cover of our Order of Service this morning.
They come from a 19th Century Scottish minister named Thomas Guthrie:
“As in nature, as in art, so in grace;
it is rough treatment that gives souls, as well as stones, their luster.”
I had never seen grace and rough treatment together like that, in the same sentence.
In nature, strong winds carve the landscape and mountain streams smooth out the stones.
In art, stories are legion about the hardships great artists endured to stay with their calling.
But in grace – grace is a gift with no strings attached.
So what is the relationship between grace and rough treatment – life’s hard edges?
Well, it’s when we’ve been brought to our knees that we most need a moment of grace.
If a good and loving God spread out the earth and gave us breath and life,
that same God also gave each of us a resilient soul
and the unique desire to find meaning in even the most tragic events.
A girl dies and a scholarship fund is founded in her memory.
A bridge collapses and engineers come up with far better designs for every new bridge that is built.
A hurricane floods New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,
and the levees will be stronger than ever –
and volunteer groups are still helping people put their lives back together.
During his campaign for president,
John F. Kennedy was shocked by the widespread hunger he saw in West Virginia,
and as president he created the food stamp program, which today helps feed millions.
I believe we often have within us much of what is needed to answer our own prayers.
The question Isaiah puts in front of us is:
when all is said and done, what beliefs do you want to try to live by?
And if we choose to believe in God’s promises – to live as if they are real and true –
then we will live accordingly: we will take hold of someone’s hand,
help bring a little light into a dark place, and try to make the rough places smooth.
We will do our part.
In another life, I was the Director of a primary care medical clinic in Austin, Texas.
I’ve spoken about it once before, so I apologize for what will be a re-run for some of you.
The clinic, like this church, was very much it’s own thing:
we were non-profit, our patient fees were based on a sliding scale,
and we had more than 10,000 patients in the greater Austin area.
We provided all of their medical care short of an emergency room.
Most of our patients were working poor people, often working more than one job,
and, of course, they had no health insurance –
they were just getting by, but they earned enough to put them over the guidelines for Medicaid.
So the clinic was their saving grace.
My medical staff was top-notch and none of us made much money,
but I was good at rounding up what we needed to serve all those people six days a week.
And if I ever got discouraged,
all I had to do was spend a few hours helping our receptionist check people in.
Because when you saw just one frantic mother come through our door
holding a crying baby with an ear infection,
and then saw the relief in her eyes an hour later, you knew you were doing God’s work.
We were all helping make the rough places smooth.
Last Wednesday, President Bush vetoed a bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
The program is called S-chip for short, and it covers the same kind of families we saw at the clinic.
We’re the richest country in the world, and the number of uninsured children in our country is rising.
This bill, which was drafted by key members of both parties and approved by both houses,
would have added from two to four million children to the S-chip program,
and the money to pay for them would have come from higher taxes on cigarettes.
The president and his defenders have their reasons, of course.
The one you most often hear is under the expanded program,
even families earning as much as $83,000 a year would be eligible – and that’s true.
But it’s true in just one state.
And that one state is New York – where medical bills are among the highest in the nation.
That’s why New York wants to raise the eligibility level for S-chip children to 400 percent of poverty.
For the rest of the country, the eligibility level is 300 percent.
Please forgive me if you feel I am stepping over a boundary line here.
I believe our religious values should affect our politics,
and programs like S-chip are saving graces for millions of families –
they are a covenant between like you and me and people who have no place to go
when their children get sick.
We should all have an unquiet conscience about this.
Today is World Communion Sunday.
And communion is about letting people in, not keeping them out.
One Sunday morning eight years ago, a journalist named Sara Miles
wandered into a church in the San Francisco Bay Area –
she got there just as people were going up to the altar to receive communion.
Sara was a not a church-goer and she didn’t understand what was happening,
but, following everyone’s example, she just walked to the altar, held out her hand,
and took the wafer when the priest gave it to her.
She says that afterwards, “For some inexplicable reason, I wanted that bread again.”
So she joined that church –
against the inclinations and beliefs of nearly everyone in her circle of friends –
and she started a food pantry in the church which serves more than 250 people every week.
The food is given out from the same altar table that is used for communion on Sunday.
For her, the food pantry is another form of communion.
Sara Miles believes in what she calls “radical inclusivity” whenever and wherever communion is served:
she believes that communion should be available to anyone who wants to take part –
a view that most orthodox Christians don’t share.
But, as she points out, she walked into a church without ever being baptized or confirmed
and was able to receive communion right away,
and that, she says, is as it should be.
Her book about all of this came out last spring – it’s called Take this Bread.
We all know what doing God’s work means – thanks, in part, to those verses in Isaiah:
“I will take hold of your hand ... for you are precious in my sight.”
Doing God’s work means doing unto others, loving your neighbor, taking hold of someone’s hand.
It means doing what we can to help smooth out the rough places.
We can do these things whether we believe in a good and loving God or not.
Anne Lamott, with her sharp eye for both our weaknesses and our strengths,
has said that “unconditional love is a reality, but with shelf life of about eight to ten seconds,”
so once you’ve figured out the next right thing to do, don’t wait too long.
If the Scottish minister quoted on our cover were here in this pulpit today,
he would say, “Do it now.
“It is not safe to leave a generous feeling to the cooling influences of the world.” Amen.