FIREWORKS OF GRACE

Matthew 11: 28-30; Romans 7:14-25

 

 

            I hope all of you had a fun and restful 4^TH OF July holiday.  As Deb and I were getting ready for bed after our holiday, we heard what sounded like a thunderstorm.  When we went out on our back deck we could make out the faint glow of the Trinity Fest Fireworks.

            Fireworks have long bee associated with July 4^th celebrations.  Your holiday isn’t complete without a parade, a cookout, and fireworks.  Fireworks actually originated with the Chinese.  The invention of gunpowder by the Chinese was actually the result of trying to find a medicine for eternal life.  Taoist sages believed that human beings were earthly deities and that through inner cultivation humans could become supernatural beings with eternal life.  Coupled with this pursuit of inner cultivation was an early stage of chemistry called Alchemy.  The alchemists thought that they could refine sand and base ore into gold and other magical medicine that would never rot.  The outer refining techniques of these alchemists eventually produced gunpowder, which led to fireworks.

            In our Epistle lesson for today the apostle Paul struggles with a similar kind of inner cultivation and outer refining, and there is an explosion going on inside of him!

            I do not understand my own actions.

            I do not do what I want, but the very thing I hate!

            I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my actions another law at war with my intentions—making me captive to the law of sin….

            WRETCHED MAN THAT I AM!

 

Even though the language that Paul uses may be confusing to us, somehow this text resonates with us.  We identify with Paul’s struggle.  We know this war, this explosion, the push/pull of knowing the good but doing the bad.

            Paul is not saying that humans are intrinsically evil.  Quite the opposite.  He uses the term “inmost self” to refer to that part of us that has been created in the image of God—our divine nature.  But, he says, we are also human and enslaved to sin.

 

Maybe some more modern language would be helpful….

There is a sin-principle, Paul argues, that resides like an alien power within us, determined to dominate our flesh and corrupt all our actions.  It’s an alien operating system, a worm virus wreaking havoc in the deepest cavities of our moral hard drive.

            When we want to do what is good, this virus lays close at hand, tapping and scrambling all our spiritual data and programs.  When we attempt to follow the law of God, an internal code war erupts—full of command deletions and program overwrites.  When we deconstruct the mess we’ve made of our day, our week, or our life, we come face to face with a nature, an inclination, a power, that pushes us to disobey and rebel. 

The result, according to Paul, is that we are captive to this alien power that dwells within us.

            So how are we to escape?  Paul says, not by our own self-will or self-determination, and that’s a hard one to take in, in this day and age of self-made millionaires, politicians, executives, educators, ministers, and entertainers.  Our society places a high value on our self-made efforts; the apostle Paul does not.

            Some more powerful force outside our best efforts is needed to rescue humankind and bring our divided personality into a whole being.  That force is the power—the fireworks—of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.  Paul blurts it out in the moment of his deepest anguish and despair:  Wretched person that I am!  Who will rescue me?  THANKS BE TO GOD THROUGH JESUS CHRIST!

 

            But you know, sometimes I think the language of grace is hard to articulate, hard to hear in mere words and definitions.  Like our lesson from Romans, not only do we resonate with human struggle, we also resonate with people’s experiences of grace.  We intuit the language of grace through story and come to recognize it at work in our own lives.

Anne Lamott, in her book Traveling Mercies, says that grace is

“the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook.  It is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way.  It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you.  Grace is the light or electricity (or fireworks) or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.”

 

Another writer, Kathleen Norris, experienced God’s grace in the gaze of an infant:

One morning I noticed a young couple with an infant at an airport departure gate.  The baby was staring intently at other people, and as soon as he recognized a human face, no matter whose it was, no matter if it was young or old, pretty or ugly, bored or happy, or worried-looking he would respond with absolute delight.  It was beautiful to see.  Our drab departure gate had become the gate of heaven.  And as I watched that baby play with any adult who would allow it, I felt awe-struck, because I realized that this is how God looks at us, staring into our faces in order to be delighted, to see the creature God made and called good, along with the rest of creation.  And, as Psalm 139 puts it, darkness is as nothing to God, who can look right through whatever evil we’ve done in our lives to the creature made in the divine image.  And maybe that’s one reason we worship—to respond to grace.

 

In our gospel lesson for today Jesus says that indeed those who hear and respond to grace are like infants….He also says, Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened by the war going on inside of you—and I will give you rest.  I will give you Sabbath from your struggle.

            In September 1990, PBS aired a special by Bill Moyers on the impact the hymn Amazing Grace has had on people’s lives.  It is America’s favorite hymn, according to Congress.  It’s been recorded by more performers than any other hymn.  Moyer’s himself was stunned at its power—his show drew 2 to 5 times more viewers that any other PBS special like it.

            The person who wrote the hymn was born in July of 1725.  John Newton was born the son of a commander of a merchant ship.  As an adult he became the commander of an English slave ship.  He would pack his human cargo side by side, row by row, in chains.  The sick would be thrown overboard and those Africans who survived the long voyage would be sold or traded for sugar and molasses to manufacture rum.

            On one voyage, Newton’s ship got caught in a storm.  Exhausted from pumping water, he tied himself to the helm in the middle of the night, to try to keep the ship on course.  It was in those moments that Newton realized how ruined, wrecked, and storm tossed his life had become.  At that point of despair, Newton gave his life to Christ.  He wrote in his journal some years later:  On that day the Lord sent from on high and delivered me out of deep water.

            As a result of that conversion, Newton gave up his slave trade and became a minister.  Often, for his Sunday evening services he would compose hymns for his congregation to sing.  Amazing Grace was one of those hymns.  Some historians believe that the words to that hymn came from Newton’s experience of grace that night on his ship, and that the tune he later used was actually an old slave song.

 

My friends, whether you use the image of war or a storm to describe the conflict that goes on inside of you, know that God’s grace frees us.  So, I invite you to sing with the apostle Paul, and John Newton, and me, the words of that familiar hymn…. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound……