Libby
Stephens
July
30, 2006 – Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Texts:
Psalm 14; Ephesians 3:14-21
Grace
Comes in Unexpected Ways
When I read the lectionary texts for
today, I immediately saw a connection between Psalm 14 and Ephesians 3:14-21. I
saw emotion, emotion expressed with passion. It does not say, “Some people are
not very nice.” It says, “There is no one who does good.”
It is not “God loves us.” It says, “I pray that you may have the power to
comprehend…what is the breadth and length and height
and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you
may be filled with all the fullness of God.” The Psalmist was mad, “mad enough
to spit,” mad at the whole world. The writer of Ephesians was in love, in love
with God, in love with faith, in love with humanity.
The Psalm could probably be used, and
probably has been, in a sermon pointing out all our flaws/sins/shortcomings and
reminding us how bad and evil we are. And yet the Ephesians passage reminds us
how blessed we are, and that there is this amazing all-encompassing love inside
us even if we don’t fully understand it.
The first time I read the Psalm it
resonated with me as a diatribe against all those people I get angry with when
I listen to the news, the people who are tearing this world apart with hatred,
violence and greed. Then, as I began to talk with others about these texts the
conversations began to focus on parenting, and how we can experience these
polar opposite emotions at the same time when we are interacting with our
children.
To be honest, this is not something I
really want to admit to – that I get mad at my child. I wasn’t sure I wanted to
talk about it in my sermon. I kept trying to write my sermon without putting
that in, but I kept getting stuck. My arguments always seemed to come back
around to it. And then the other day, it all came together in a flash, and I
knew I had to include it in my sermon.
My son, Henry, turned two last week, and
let me say he is an amazing two-year-old. He is talking up a storm, he is
showing interest in being potty trained (keep your fingers crossed for us on
that one), and he says please and thank you without prompting, sometimes. He
even said ‘Gracias’ the other day. Oh yeah, and he is learning to express his
emotions (with creative body movements and often in public places like stores,
parking lots, and restaurants).
Henry is also learning to be helpful. He
picks up his toys with a little prompting and a lot of help. He helps clear the
dinner table. He even helps pull weeds in the garden (and a few vegetable
plants). Recently, he has decided that he should help clean off his high chair
tray after he eats. He will start by pouring any excess liquid out of his cup
onto the tray and then begin to swipe back and forth with his hand, which makes
the liquid slosh off the tray on the floor. Then he will dump anything left on
his plate or bowl onto the tray, mix it in nicely with the milk or juice, and
then begin to take it off the tray and drop it on the floor.
The other morning he added a new step. I
noticed he was starting his clean-up process while he sat in the high chair. He
poured some milk out on his tray and began to swish the cereal around in it.
But then he started eating the cereal, and I thought “Oh, he just wanted some
milk on his cereal. I will leave him be for a minute.” Then, he picked up his
cup, looked in it, realized there was milk left in it and proceeded to pour it
out directly onto the floor. That was it! I hurried over and took the tray off
the high chair, at which point he began to kick his feet, arch his back, and
scream loudly. I got mad. I looked at him and said, “Go ahead, have a hissy. I don’t care. Because you would make the mess, but I
have to clean it up!” And then suddenly it hit me. I wonder if God ever says
that. Does God ever get mad at us for the messes we make? How do I reconcile
this image of an angry God with the image of God as Love that is beyond our
comprehension?
There is this children’s book I love to
read to Henry called Big Momma Makes the
World. It is a creation story with a God figure, Big Momma, who is this
round mama that looks like a Buddha and has this little baby on her hip the
whole time. After six days of creating, Big Momma is ready for a rest. “Ready
to bundle up with that little baby of hers in that big blue blanket of the
sky….Every once in a while when she’s burping the baby or making cookies or
rocking that little baby to sleep, Big Momma looks down and says, ‘Better
straighten up down there.’”
There are several stories in the Hebrew
Scriptures of God getting mad, doing something rash and then regretting it. The
most memorable one is the Flood story. Some say the rainbow is a symbol of
God’s regret about acting in anger, as well as God’s promise to never do it
again. How many times do we promise that to ourselves and others?
Even in the midst of my anger with Henry,
I still loved him. When he started crying because I had hurt his feelings by
yelling at him over spilt milk, I sat down, put him on my lap and said I was
sorry. In those moments, which are not our finest, when our anger leaps forth,
we can find comfort in the strength of love.
The Ephesians text offers a balm, an
ointment to the raw, wounding and wounded words of the Psalm. Where the Psalm reminds
us of the evil that we perpetuate on others, “there is no one who does good,” the Ephesians passage tells of the abundance of God’s
love which is “rooted and grounded” in us.
That is where grace comes in. As the
Psalmist points out there are moments we don’t deserve God’s love – “there is
no one who does good…. No, not one.” Yet we turn to
Ephesians and find that God has the power to work within us to accomplish far
more than all we can ask or imagine, that there is a love that surpasses our
knowledge. God acts in ways beyond our understanding. God acts in unexpected
ways.
The end of Psalm 14 conjures an image in
my head of The Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz shaking her finger
and saying, “I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog, too.” The psalmist
suggests that the evildoers will be punished. “They shall be in terror.” But
the psalm actually speaks more to what God will provide for those who are
mistreated or injured by the deeds of the evildoers, rather than focusing on
any judgment or retribution visited on the evildoers. “The lord is their
refuge…the Lord restores the fortunes of God’s people.” God provides grace.
It is very easy for us to vision God as a
parent. We use language all the time that calls these images forth – Father,
Mother, Creator. God provides. God loves. God sustains. God gets angry. Even
when God gets angry, God is always there, always loving.
Why is it so hard to see this God as a child who loves unconditionally – a
child who offers us grace even in the midst of our anger?
Many times grace comes unexpectedly. Ann Lamott finishes her story, “The third time Sam called for
me the other night, I finally blew up in the living room, and there was then
this great silence in the house, silence like suspended animation: here I’d
been praying for silence , and it turns out to be so charged and toxic. I lay
on the couch with my hands over my face, shocked by how hard it is to be a
parent. And after a minute Sam sidled out, still needing to see me, to snuggle with me, with mean me, needing to find me –
like the baby spider pushing in through the furry black legs of the mother
tarantula, knowing she’s in there somewhere.” (from Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith by Ann
Lamott.)
In Ephesians, too, we find this image of
God pushing through, pushing through like a child–looking for the real us. “I
pray that God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being… and
that Christ may dwell in your hearts… as you are rooted and grounded in love.”
God finds a way in, just like the child, enfolding us in a “love that surpasses
knowledge” until we are “filled with the fullness of God.”