Reign of Christ Sunday

Reverend Lucy M. Alexander
Colossians 1:11-20, Luke 23:33-43

Who is He?

Jesus.
The Christ.
Saviour.
Word.
Of God.
Born in human flesh.
Healer.
Redeemer.
Drunkard.
Drunkard?
Oh Yes, Jesus had a reputation. Matthew tells us: The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”
Rabbi.
Monarch.
Refugee.
Refugee?
Indeed, for Jesus’ family fled to Egypt when he was born.
Seated at the right hand of God.
Maker of heaven and earth.
Yet he was homeless, a wanderer.
Homeless?
A wanderer?
Yes. Jesus said that the Son of Man had nowhere to rest his head. Even foxes and birds were better off than him.
Good shepherd.
Sovereign of all the world.
Crucified.
Crucified?
Dead?
Alive!
Alive?
Within and among us even now.
In you?
And me?
In all of us.
Jesus.
Christ.
Saviour.
Alive forever!
Alive forever!
(Seasons of the Spirit curriculum, Year C, Sunday, November 25, 2007)

Who is He? You’ve just heard the answer. And it’s full of questions. And that’s just as it should be. Marcus Borg, theologian and author, talks about two ways of thinking of Jesus: the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus. He prefers this way of speaking of Jesus to thinking of the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith. He doesn’t want to separate the living, breathing, historical man, from the Resurrected One who has pierced the hearts of so many down through the centuries. Except for one or two mentions of Jesus in historical texts of his time, there is no historical record of Jesus except through the gospels. And those gospels are permeated by the faith of those who recognized in Jesus a particular view of reality and of God. So where does that leave us?

Today, I think, we are offered three distinct ways of approaching – not answering – but approaching the question of who Jesus is. The first has to do with the fact that today is Reign of Christ Sunday. It is the last Sunday of the Christian year. It is in many ways the culmination of the Christian year. It is a grand view: Jesus reigning in our lives, in the world, in the cosmos. For those for whom such a view might seem too hierarchical, maybe even too exclusive, perhaps a circular image might work. Today we celebrate Jesus as the center of our lives. Our Colossians text for today says this: “He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Eugene Peterson describes the Christians in Colossae in this way. He says that these Christians are surrounded by a polytheistic culture. He says that, “most people of that day believed the air around them was thick with unseen spirits that humans ignored at their peril.” He says that, “we may think at first that this sounds strange and outdated, but
don't we live in fear of many powers ourselves? Don't we fear the power of greed, and war, and violence, and addiction, and commercialism? Doesn't it feel sometimes like the Powers That Be influence our lives more than our own careful plans and preparations, let alone the power of God? Who is He? Who is Jesus? Jesus is the One in whom all things are held together, in whom all the parts of our lives can be channeled towards an integrity of body, mind, and spirit.

Our second way of approaching who Jesus is comes with the end of the church year. Here we are today, as the Colossians text asserts, celebrating “all the strength that comes from his glorious power.” Tomorrow He won’t be here. It’s like looking over the top of a great mountain and seeing deep into the gorge on the other side. There is a sense of dizziness, maybe even of nausea. Tomorrow, we will be plunged into Advent, into the waiting with longing for a Messiah. We will be plunged into darkness, not being able to know what is to come, having no idea that there is a Mary who has felt some movement deep in the core of her being.

And yet this journey too is how we begin to get a sense of who Jesus is. We walk with Him, year after year. We wait. We watch Him be held tenderly in Mary and Joseph’s arms. We travel with Him as disciples, not really knowing where we’re going, but knowing this is the journey we must take. We fear the Romans and the increasing antagonism of the religious authorities. We sense what will happen if we go with Him to Jerusalem. And we do try to go, even as we want to flee. The anguish of His crucifixion is more than we can bear, even as the joy of His resurrection is also more than we can bear. We don’t know what to make of either one. And yet we walk, we try to walk with Him. Increasingly we know that He walks with us. One day we wake up and we know who He is, even in the midst of our not knowing.

Our Third way of approaching who Jesus is comes to us with today’s gospel text. It is this text that took my breath away as I was going over the lectionary texts for today for the first time. We are taken abruptly from the glory of reign of Christ Sunday directly to the crucifixion. As the text tells us, “when they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left….(and) the leaders scoffed at him, saying, 'He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!' The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, 'If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!'”

Save yourself! How many of us know all about that. When we are faced with a small bump in the road of our lives, we don’t need to save ourselves. We can turn to God for help. When we have a friend who is in trouble, a friend who is not too close to us to give us too much grief, we don’t need to save ourselves. We can turn to God for help.

When our lives feel fairly secure, we don’t need to save ourselves. We can turn to God for help. But what about those times when we, like Jesus, are on the cross? Can we turn to God then? What about those times when our very lives are in jeopardy, those times when we feel utterly doomed? Can we turn to God then? What about those times when we simply can’t get out of bed because of the blackness of the world around us?

Can we turn to God then? Or are we in such extreme circumstances that God seems to have lost all power. We have no choice but to save ourselves, because God couldn’t possibly do it. We have only ourselves.

This third way of approaching who Jesus is has to do with relationship: his deep, abiding faith in God, even at the depths of his life. We begin to approach who Jesus is, not by seeing Him alone. We begin to see who Jesus is, only by seeing how intertwined He is with God. It’s not that He doesn’t question God. It’s not that He doesn’t get angry at God. It’s not that He never becomes afraid, even as He knows God is with him.

It’s just this. God is at the core of who He is and that relationship transcends all.

Jesus.
          Crucified.
Crucified?
          Dead?
Alive!
          Alive?
Alive!
          Within and among us even now.

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Sixth Sunday of Easter (Mother's Day) — Illusion of Self-Sufficiency

Rev. Lucy M. Alexander
John 5:1-9, Acts 16:9-15

It was a time of festival for the Jews. And so, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in the northeast corner of Jerusalem, near the Sheep gate, there was a pool. This pool was known for its healing properties. In fact, legend had it that the first person into the water after it was stirred up by the Lord’s angel, would be healed. So it was natural for people seeking healing to gather there. On Jesus’ journey, he came upon this famous pool and saw all who were lying there: the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. There was one man there, though, who drew his attention. He knew that this man had been there for thirty-eight years. We overhear the conversation between Jesus and this man. “Do you want to be made well?” “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”
Recently, in my leafing through catalogs of worship, education, theology – really all kinds of materials – I came across a packet of CDs called The Bible Experience. It is a dramatic reading aloud of the entire New Testament. I debated but not long. Of course I bought it. Then I justified the purchase by thinking to myself that it could help me with my Bible and prayer time. I could listen to passages as I drove up and down 93, on my way up and back from church. It would be a time-saver. So this was how I first heard the text for today. Driving along, I pushed the CD player button, expecting to relax back into another person’s reading. But I didn’t relax long. It’s surprising I didn’t hit the car in front of me. I was completely unprepared for the jolt I received. This dramatic reading out loud of John’s text crawled right under my skin. In fact, I completely missed Exit 4 on route 93 as I was driving up to the church.
I had always heard this text as one of Jesus’ healing miracles. And it is that. A man is ill. He has been ill for 38 years. Jesus comes along, has compassion on him and heals him. It’s not that such a healing is not miraculous. But I think it’s easy to become immune to such healings in the gospel text. I mean, after all, that’s what Jesus does. He heals people. So this story is just one more proof of that. Something we probably know about Jesus even if we’ve never before been to church. Or confirmation of something we have known and heard ever since we were baptized as babies or put into a toddler classroom by our parents. Jesus heals people. That’s one of the reasons we come to church. But somehow this healing power can sometimes lose its impact because it loses its surprise. It’s what we expect.
The jolt I received as I drove past my exit on route 93 was that I heard the text differently. I was even more taken aback when I began to register just what my reaction was. I was angry. Really angry. And my focus was not on Jesus. It was on the man who was ill. The man who had been ill for 38 years. Can you imagine? 38 years is a very long time. This may not sound very politically correct, because as Christians we are supposed to reach out and help others, but what was this man thinking? Thirty-eight years he sat there and not once in all that time – probably most of a life in those days – did he ask someone to help him into the pool. Not once did he ask a bystander, “could you give me a hand?” That’s what he says to Jesus: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” I felt like asking him what on earth he was doing. Why didn’t he ask for help?
These gospel stories have lots of holes in them. I mean, we’re really not given a lot of information much of the time. Here we have a conversation of only three lines between Jesus and the man who is ill. That’s all. But that’s a good thing. Because it’s in those holes that we make our own home in the text. It’s in those holes that we too become part of the story. It’s in those holes that we respond in different ways at different times to the story. Now I could have censored my response to this text this past week. I could have said that my anger was completely out of line. Because I really didn’t like it very much, at least not at first. I really didn’t like the fact that it felt as though I were blaming the victim. Do I expect people in need to always have to ask for help? Isn’t it the job of those of us in a position to help to do the reaching out? To take the initiative? I didn’t like where my emotions were taking me, but I knew I was going there for a reason, so I decided to follow.
And then the cruel shock came. This man is just like me. He’s just like lots of us. We think we’re self-sufficient. We talk a lot about being in community, about helping each other. And when others are involved, we’re right there helping out. Which is wonderful. But what happens when we are the ones who need the help? Well, that is a different story. We’re taken right back to our three-year-old selves. “Mom, I can do it myself.” There is a saying that has reverberated within me throughout my life, when I have let it. “Well, you just have to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps.” When something is wrong, when you’re desperately in need of others, don’t let them know. You’re the one who has to pick yourself up. I remember trying to picture this when I was a teenager. Just how would I accomplish this? Stand there and pick myself up at the same time. Hmm, pretty tricky. Physically it just doesn’t seem possible. Which is, I suppose, the point of the expression.
We have it somehow ingrained in us to be self-sufficient. While self-sufficiency is not always a bad thing, when taken to extremes, it can become a real problem. And we may not always grasp the depth of the problem: how violent our reliance on self-sufficiency can be. Surely it’s violent that the man by the pool sat there for 38 years, thinking he had to do it all by himself. I watched a Frontline piece on public broadcasting a few nights ago talking about juveniles in the United States who are incarcerated for life without parole. Incredibly there are about 2200 of them compared to only 12 in the rest of the world. One of the stories was of a family who lived in a beautiful house in Colorado, an isolated house, up on a hill, with a beautiful view of the mountains. A location which, despite its beauty, radiated isolation and self-sufficiency. But caged within this house lived a family in so much emotional pain that the 16-year-old murdered his mother and step-father. Somehow, like the man by the Sheep Gate pool, this boy was held hostage to a family, a culture, a way of thinking that left getting any kind of help simply out of the question.
We do have self-sufficiency ingrained in us. Our culture is a culture which elevates self-sufficiency to the level of an icon. It’s not that self-sufficiency on its own is a bad thing. It’s part of our national history, an important and good part. We had to survive by our own instincts and ingenuity when our forebears first arrived on this continent. We admire those who braved the wilderness, forging their way across this continent. But sometimes it seems as if we have taken the stream of self-sufficiency and turned it into all there is. We sometimes forget that there are other streams in our history as well. Even more important for us here today, human maturity and wholeness, as defined by our Christian faith, has very little to do with self-sufficiency as so many of us tend to see it. We are baptized into a Christian family which is not our biological family. We are called into a chosen family, a family that is to be intentional about wanting and needing to love one another. That is what mature Christian personhood looks like. That’s what Jesus wants us to do. In this Christian faith of ours, our baptism is also our goal, the end toward which we are moving. To be in healthy and loving relationship with one another, with God, and with all creation.
Today is Mothers Day, and here is my message in few succinct words. We need each other. Plain and simple. We need each other. We see that need so clearly in very young children. Sometimes I sit in McDonald’s and watch parents or other adults with babies or toddlers and I am awed at just how vulnerable those children are. What would happen if that adult simply walked away? What does happen when that adult simply walks away? What does happen when our culture simply walks away? The child is left there alone, on a cold, hard plastic seat. Where would he go? What would she do? Needing others is at the very core of who children are. It is at the very core of all of us, but it’s not a core we are always very comfortable with.
Jesus healed the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years. Or, to put it more accurately, relationship with Jesus transformed the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years. Jesus could have done lots of things in this encounter. He could have picked up the man and carried him into the pool himself. He could have asked one of the others who were there as bystanders to help the man. He could have shamed the crowd by expressing his horror that in all that time, nobody had helped this poor man. But Jesus is not one who offers bandaids. He doesn’t see a wound and then cover it up with gauze and adhesive tape. He doesn’t give out crutches and say, “well, at least now you might be able to move a little bit better.” No, Jesus’ power is transformative power.
We hear in the scripture text that Jesus simply “knew” the man’s condition. He saw deeply into the man’s heart and being. He knew what the man most needed. Not to walk. Not to be healed of his paralysis. But to be healed of his paralysis of self-sufficiency. To be made well. To know that it was not only ok but imperative to ask for help.

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Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

Rev. Lucy M. Alexander, Associate Pastor
Jeremiah 17:5-10, Luke 6:17-26

Several years ago, my family and I went to a magic show.  I’d always thought of magic as something that was done at children’s birthday parties.  Or maybe something a loving uncle might do with a young nephew.  “Ok, pick a card.  Now put that card back anywhere, anywhere in the pack.”  Or the old coin trick.  A coin in the palm of the hand.  Now you see it, now you don’t.  But this magic show was magic raised to an art form.  It took place in a big old theater in Beverly, Massachusetts.  Maybe some of you have been  there.  And the magic involved a full stage production of magic and the illusions magic is based on.  You look one way, and something is happening in another corner that you are not focused on.  Boxes display surprising contents.  People seem to disappear.  Magic shows are all about illusion and the tricks our mind and our perceptions can play on us.

There are some who tend to think the Christian faith is magical.  There can be the tendency to think that our faith, like magic, involves an escape from reality.  I mean, really, how does a woman touch Jesus’ garment and become healed when all the doctors in the world have failed?  What about all those miracles?  How really could so few loaves and fish feed so many people?  And then there’s Jesus’ death, the tomb, and His resurrection.  Maybe he didn’t really die.  Maybe it was just the medicine of the time that thought he was dead.  And even if he was dead, people couldn’t really have seen him again.  It was all just an illusion.

But our Christian faith is just the opposite.  It’s not at all magical.  And it’s not at all about illusion.  Our Christian faith does something completely different.  It exposes illusion.  It tears away the veil of illusion and lets us glimpse the truth.  It lets us glimpse the way the world really is.  It does this in ways that can seem counter-intuitive.  It does this in ways that can seem contradictory or even downright impossible.  But that is because these are the only ways in which truth – profound truth – can be expressed in a world full of illusion. 

The illusion that today’s text exposes is the illusion that we are separate, one from another.  It’s the illusion that our lives are lived in separate spheres, spheres that might bump up against each other from time to time.  But then they bounce off each other, like balls on a billiard table.  It’s the illusion that our lives never really penetrate each other.  It’s the illusion that is at the core of so many of the “isms” we encounter:  racism, sexism, anti-Semitism.  It’s the illusion that I am here and you are there and there is no bridge between us.  It’s the illusion that you are the other and not part of me.

I think of my most recent visit to a hospital emergency room.  The person I was with had been told, after some blood test results, that she should get admitted as soon as possible.  I found myself, thinking, maybe we won’t have to go through the emergency room.  But it was after hours, and even though the doctor had called ahead to say the patient was coming, there was the regular procedure that needed to be gone through of registration and then waiting for triage.  While we were there, the outpatient doctor called to make sure the patient was at the hospital because the situation was volatile.  Clearly there was quite a bit of concern.

But the people at the admitting desk were completely unresponsive.  “You’ll have to wait,” they said, “and there’s no telling how long that wait might be.”  We asked if maybe they could just give us a ball park estimate:  “half an hour or 6 hours?”  They couldn’t tell us.  But the hard part wasn’t just the lack of information.  It was the sense I got that we just didn’t matter.  It felt as though the patient could have been in cardiac arrest and we would have simply been told to take our place in line.

I began to look around me.  There was a man over there with his head in his hands, looking as though he were in utter despair.  There was the couple talking in quick hushed tones to one another, clearly trying to wrap their thoughts around the situation.  And then there were the babies.  How could they know why they weren’t home, pain free and in bed?  But here they were, out in the cold night, having no idea what this strange world of the emergency room was.  And there were their new parents, panicked at what might lie ahead.   “What have we come to?”  I found myself thinking.  How is it that we have all landed here, in this spot, at this time?  And yet here we are seemingly on completely separate tracks of crisis and pain, our lives having nothing to do with each other. 

Today’s texts expose the illusion of separateness in both words and images.  They point to the much deeper reality of our connection to God and to one another.  In Luke, we heard the beginning of what is called the Sermon on the Plain.  This is Luke’s counterpart to the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew.  Luke’s account, however, does not take place on a mountaintop.  A UCC commentator notes that “rather, after a time of prayer up on the mountain, Jesus gathers his disciples and brings them down to a place accessible to many people, many different people, including even Gentiles and the crowds of people who were marginalized because of disease and unclean spirits.  The text says that he healed not just a few but all of those who came to him, hungry in so many ways for dignity and acceptance, for wholeness and health, for forgiveness, freedom and hope.”†  Here we find Jesus, empowered by God, so clearly expressing his solidarity with people – people of all races, nationalities, faiths.

And then there’s Jeremiah.  “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”  As one commentator puts it, “deep roots will be able to find water, even in times of drought.  These trees will not be anxious and will not cease to bear fruit.”

I can remember a trip a few years ago to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to visit Bob’s mother and his brother and his wife, Al and Liz.  I fell in love with the desert.  I loved the way you could see for miles.  I loved the way the rock formations seemed to reveal the very shape of the earth.  I loved the way people lived, their homes and pottery feeling as though they themselves emerged from the desert.

But I’ll never forget the day we set out for a road trip down to the southern part of New Mexico.  We were to be gone only a couple of days.  So we left most of our things at Al and Liz’s house, packing lightly.  We made sandwiches for lunch, made sure our maps and guide books were in the car.  And then we started to say goodbye when Liz came out to the car.  She looked at us in amazement.  “Where’s your water?” she asked.  We showed her about 5 bottles of spring water ready to drink.  She looked nonplussed.  “You just don’t understand,” she said.  “People die out there.”   

Water is the most basic stuff of life.  Some substantial percentage of the earth’s surface is covered with water.  We ourselves emerge from water, out of our mother’s wombs.  The body can’t live without water – you can survive without food for a good number of days – but without water you will die.  The truth that we are connected to one another and to God is a basic to life as this everyday substance we call water.  The Bible tells us this over and over again.  Our connectedness is the truth about life.  When we think we are separate, when we act as if we are separate, we are living out of an illusion, just like those illusions that can be created with decks of cards.

A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.  The doctors thought it was fairly localized and were prepared for surgery when it was discovered that it had spread to her bones.  She and her family couldn’t believe it.  But she had had all sorts of scans – CT, MRI, bone scan, and they all revealed the same thing.  The pictures showed porousness in many places in her skeleton.  That seemed to be the fact of the situation.  She pictured her ribs and her arms as being like a sea shell which the ocean has turned into a kind of sieve, riddled with holes. 

But one day, as she was driving, she had a strange sensation.  The holes in her bones were being filled.  Her skeleton had been left with gaps, but it was as if those gaps had simply been put there so that they could be filled by the Holy Spirit.  She felt herself whole again, made new by God’s breath within her.  The science was only a partial truth.  The deeper truth of the matter was that God was in her and she was in God and she was no longer separate and alone. 

† SAMUEL, Lectionary Commentary on United Church of Christ website.

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Third Sunday after Epiphany, Year C

Rev. Lucy M. Alexander, Associate Pastor
Psalm 19:1-4, 7-10;  Luke 4:14-21

I wanted to talk to you today about grace.  Partly because it’s the season of Epiphany.  But partly also because of an experience I had a few weeks ago.  It’s one you may have had as well.  Have you ever found yourself thinking or saying something and you wonder, “where on earth did that come from?”  As it happened to me, it was as if I was hearing myself at the same time as I was speaking.  I found myself thinking, “oh, that’s interesting.  Why don’t I just stop and listen and see what comes out next.”  And it was almost as if I was listening to someone else.  This can be dangerous, of course.  After all, who knows what might come out.  We’ve all heard the expression, “open mouth, insert foot.”  But what I’m talking about is a bit different.  The experience is like this.  It’s as if, while you’re speaking, a part of yourself is speaking that you feel you couldn’t have brought to consciousness by yourself.  You have the sense that you need to give that part of yourself the space to express what it needs to.  Because it might be saying something important that the other parts of you couldn’t have laid their fingers on.

Maybe an example would help.  A few weeks ago was our first class on the book “What’s Theology?”  We’ve been trying to have these classes on Sunday evenings and the first one went off as planned.  But then last week, there was what felt like an out of the blue ice storm and a Patriots upset, so class was cancelled.  And, depending on your perspective whether this is good or bad news, the Patriots will be playing again tonight.  But, I’m getting off track.  Let’s go back to that first class.  As an opening prayer, since it was the first Sunday of Epiphany, I reflected on the wise men following that star to Bethlehem.  As I was speaking, a new sense of those wise men came to me.  It hit me deep in my soul, just what an amazing thing it was that they would stake their entire lives on a star.  It’s nutty, really, when you think about it more realistically.  Their lives, their whole sense of how they lived those lives, was well established.  And here they were, trekking across those deserts, following what could turn out to be just an illusion of brightness.  But they knew differently.  They knew differently so deep within themselves that they devoted years of their lives journeying towards that star.  My sense is that it was because God’s grace had reached them in their faraway lands with those beams of light.

Jesus’ words we heard today give flesh and blood to the same grace felt by those wise men:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because he has anointed me
To bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

The hymn we have just sung today, Amazing Grace, also gives flesh and blood to the experience of grace.  It is one of the most universally loved in all of the Christian faith, giving cathedral-like proportions to the experience of grace.  “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”  It gives us a deep emotional response to the words Jesus preached in Nazareth. 

A number of years ago, my family and I went to one of those corn mazes you sometimes find in the Fall.  Maybe you have been to one.  The corn has reached its full height and a path has been cut through it.  It’s almost like a labyrinth.  We set out around 2pm one Sunday afternoon when my kids were little, thinking we’d just have a nice Sunday jaunt.  And into the maze we went.  Around and around we went.  It was fun at first, but then Geoffrey and Emily started to get tired and I was getting pretty ready to go hom.  And it was also steadily getting darker.  I knew that we hadn’t been trapped in the maze and yet I could feel myself getting a little panicky.  And my relief was strong when we realized that there was a tower in one corner of the maze with a person there to whom we could call to ask the way out.   

“I once was lost and but now am found.”  What a deeply freeing experience that is.  Grace is a wonderful thing.  But my question for today is this.  If grace is so wonderful, why can it also be so hard?  Why did so many in Jesus’ congregation that day respond with such animosity?  Why did so many throughout Jesus’ life respond with such animosity?  Why are God’s grace and Jesus’ Cross so inextricably intertwined?  Despite its gloriousness, why is it sometimes just as hard for us to receive this gift of grace as it was for the people of Nazareth?           

I think one of the reasons is that we think about grace in limited ways.  And some of these ways are ones we hear around us.  Grace tends to be forced into an either/or box.  Either you have it or you don’t.  Either you feel it or you don’t.  Either you feel it the way others feel it or you haven’t quite got it.  To put it bluntly, it’s black or white thinking.   And such thinking is not only limited, it can be dangerous.  We can begin to feel inadequate as Christians if we don’t feel we’ve had the proper dose of grace in our lives.  We can begin to wonder, “what’s wrong with me?”  Or maybe we sense a feeling deep inside us we don’t quite dare acknowledge.  “Could it be possible that we just don’t deserve such a gift?”  Perhaps worst of all can come the question, “why doesn’t God love me?” But such thinking doesn’t take into account the very wonderful individuality of each of us.   Think about Jesus’ words:  how specific they are.   Grace means good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed.  Grace can be and is felt by us in radically different ways, depending on what our situation is.  Grace for me is never the same as grace for you because grace is particular and specific. 

But even if we move beyond what I call this limited thinking about grace, grace can still be difficult.  Because it can make us feel powerless.  How many of us have thought or felt, when facing a difficult situation, “gee, God, I could really use a little grace here.”  The sense is that it’s all in God’s control, and we are reduced to beggars.  We are the poor, the blind, the oppressed and we hold out our cups, hoping that God will see fit to drop in a coin or two.  But I ask you.  What kind of a God is this?  Is this the God who poured out his heart and his home for a son who had squandered his inheritance?  Is this the God who dined well with sinners and saints alike, who held a feast for thousands in an out of the way place?  Is this the God who, on the night before death, shared a meal with beloved disciples? 

We often can’t touch or feel grace.  And we know this.  But this is another thing  which makes grace hard.  We may doubt its reality.  Partly because we don’t always trust our own perceptions.  We may have an experience of grace but we call it something else.  “Oh, that man just happened to be there at the right time.”  Or, “they’ve finally found a treatment that works.”  These things may be true, but that doesn’t mean that God’s grace didn’t play a part.  Again, it’s not an either/or.  While we can’t touch or feel grace in and of itself, we can see the baby that was born in the manger.  We can listen to the story of the wise men who followed the star.  But even so, we can still find ourselves thinking and feeling that these events, or such events in our own lives, are really departures from the world as it really is.  They’re nice events.  Even wonderful events.  But they’re not things we can count on. 

In two different ways this morning, we have heard a different story.  We have given children Bibles and have said that those Bibles are an important part of the foundation for their lives.  We could be declaring something different to them.  But this is what we are saying:  that the grace revealed in the pages of that book will give them the very real building blocks of a full and human life.  And we have heard Jesus’ words as he begins his public ministry.  He too could have declared something different.  But this is what I hear him saying.  “Grace is who I am.  Grace is my flesh and blood and very being.  Grace is my heart beat.  And with my birth, God is showing that grace is how the world is made.”  Grace is at the core of creation.  Grace is something we can count on.  Grace is what we need to base our lives on, as hard as that can sometimes be.

It’s not easy to give up everything and trek across a desert towards a star.  And it is true that grace can seem as hard to grasp as those beams of light.  Because it does come to us only in fragments.  We can’t know its full reality.   But grace is not a limited or a once in a while occurrence.  As we learn, like the wise men, to trust that grace, more and more, it will become the foundation of our lives.  What difference might it make if we prayed each morning, “how might I live out of grace today?”  And each evening:  “how have I lived out of grace today?

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