The Sweet Smell of Grace!

I have spent a good deal of my life thinking about the theological concept of grace.

What is grace?

How does God offer grace?

To whom does God offer grace?

However, the wonderful thing about the Gospel’s is that they don’t spend much time giving us great theological treatise about grace.

Instead they give us images, and stories that show that grace.

Our Gospel from John this morning is a good case in point.

In the first chapter of John’s Gospel John has told us that it is from Jesus that we receive, “grace upon grace”.

The rest of the Gospel is then images and stories that show us in real time what that grace looks like.

This morning we also get to an image of what it smelt like.

“The whole house smelled of the fragrance.”

Grace is not so much a theological proposition as it is a lived experience.

It got me thinking about all of us here this morning.

How do we experience grace upon grace?

What does grace smell like?

What does grace look like?

One thing I love to do on my day off is cook.

In fact, my perfect day off is cooking a meal for friends and family.

There is something about making food and then being in the company of people who will enjoy it with you.

I love it when people walk in my house and say, “something smells good.”

That is what grace smells like.

I used to work at home for abused and neglect kids.

That house had a certain smell.

Not all that pleasant.

Imagine a home with 13 teenagers living together.

This winter I was able to volunteer a couple of nights at the emergency cold winter shelter at South Church.

The shelter once all the guests where there had that same smell.

To me that is the smell of grace.

Where there is trouble and hardship.

I find God to be there.

In the midst of people struggling, and yet finding a way, I find God.

It isn’t always pretty, but it is graced filled.

I can still remember the smell of my grandparents house in New Jersey.

Or the smell of my grandparents house in Worcester, MA.

That is the smell of grace.

Because it was a place I loved going to and always felt welcomed and loved there.

How about the smell of pine needles, at camp calumet as you enter the outdoor chapel?

I have a friend who hadn’t been to camp in many years.

She said that when she walked on camp and smelled that smell of camp she cried, because it was the time in her life she felt most loved.

The smell of campfire late at night while camping, or the smell of the ocean?

All these things remind me of God’s grace, because they fill me with scenes of a living God at work.

That day in Bethany, Mary brings the smell of grace to that dinner.

She brings a jar of perfume and uses it as a gift for Jesus.

And it seems to others as too extravagant.

“This could have been used for the poor.”

Mary uses a year’s worth of wages on anointing Jesus feet.

Surely that is over the top.

Surely the money was better spent somewhere else.

That is what grace looks like.

It is extravagant and perhaps even indulgent.

Who in our lives have we indulged?

Who have we been extravagant too?

Yesterday, we had a service of gratitude that included many partners from our AA groups that meet here.

During this worship service people from AA got to share some thoughts on their sobriety.

Each story that was told was a ray of God’s grace.

You could feel and hear grace come out of those stories and be a blessing to all of us who heard them.

During the service people were cooking corn beef and cabbage.

You might still be able to pick up some of the smells of that meal.

This was our second year of having that service with people from AA.

Now the smell of corn beef and cabbage will remind me of God’s grace.

Grace is not merely a concept but it is tangible and has a feeling, a smell, a look.

And we always know it when we see it.

My grandmother loved to tell this story about my dad.

When he was in high school he got a new car.

One day he got into an accident.

My grandfather was away on business.

So she took it to the garage to have it fixed.

She told the man, “I would really like this done before Bob returns.”

The car was fixed and my grandfather never knew until years later when she thought it safe to tell the story.

It is story of indulgence, and grace.

My father learned that lesson well.

In high school when I got in a car accident I thought my Dad was going to be real mad.

All he said was, “I am glad no one is hurt, and I am glad you are ok.”

I didn’t deserve that response.

But that is what grace looks like.

It is extravagant, and it is indulgent.

Grace often makes us act like Judas.

We don’t like it.

We want someone to pay for what they did.

We want people to be smart and “do the right thing.”

God’s grace is like someone taking all the money they have and wasting it on perfume to wipe on someone’s feet before they die.

I like to think about God in this way.

I like to think about God over indulging us.

Sure you want to waste my gifts go right ahead.

I will be here when you get done.

God is extravagant to us, because despite all the ways we have tried to ignore God, he still sent us Jesus to show us this grace.

As we enter Holy week, as we contemplate together the death and resurrection of Jesus we remember the extravagant love of God.

We remember how much Jesus went through to show us this grace.

What I have discovered since leaving seminary is that the world is desperate for these stories.

The world needs to know of this indulgent extravagant grace.

What many people don’t want is the doctrinal answers, or canned theological propositions.

But they hunger to see and smell that grace.

And they do experience it in their lives.

Just as all of us do.

May all of you see God’s extravagant grace upon grace.

May all of you have sweet smell of that grace fill your house.

And may all of us learn to share, as Mary did, our own acts of extravagant indulgent grace.

Amen

The Hard Road to Forgiveness

When I was the pastor of a Church on Long Island I received a call from the Lutheran Seminary in Philadelphia.

It was to ask if we would be willing to have an intern at our congregation next year.

In order to have an intern a congregation needs about $25,000, to pay housing, medical, and a small stipend.

The seminary said that the student lived in the area and didn’t need housing, and had insurance from her husband’s job.

Could we come up with about $5,000 for the stipend?

My congregation was struggling financially.

We sometimes had trouble paying the phone bill.

But I agreed to meet with the person needing the internship.

I met the person and liked him so I decided to go on faith and recommend it to the council.

At the council meeting I could tell that some people were skeptical how we would come up with the money.

But I made the case that we could help this person and we had to go on faith sometimes.

I put myself out there to help this student and make this happen.

The candidate came to our next council meeting to meet everyone, and he came with his home pastor.

We all agreed on terms and conditions of him becoming our intern.

About a week later I got a call from him that he decided not to come to our congregation, instead do his internship with his pastor.

I asked, “Did you tell the seminary about your decision.”

“No, I just think it is best.”

I shared my feelings that this had put me in a very awkward position, and that this is not how the process works.

Later that day I received a call from this person’s pastor to try and explain what happened.

I told the pastor that this was not right and this is not how it works and the student should be told that she needed to fix this mess he created.

The pastor then said to me, “Well…we have to forgive.”

This bothers me maybe more than anything.

It bothers me when Christians use forgiveness for a quick and easy fix to everything.

During the sex abuse scandal the Roman Catholic Church said that one of the reasons it couldn’t hand over pedophile priests to the police was because we have to forgive.

This morning’s Gospel is one of the most well known, and it is beloved by many including myself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson called it, “The greatest story in the Bible.”

It is beloved because it offers us such a wonderful picture of God.

A God who stands out looking for us to come home, a God who runs to embrace us, a God who throws a party when we return.

But it is also a complicated picture of a family fight.

And we all know those can be the worst.

I once did a funeral where the sisters in the family where feuding all the time.

One of them was responsible.

She always did the right thing.

The other was irresponsible.

She had no real job; she couldn’t meet her financial commitments.

On several occasions she had lied to multiple members of her family to get them to give her money.

And she did this on multiple times to the older sister.

And the mother usually bailed her out.

The mother would tell the older sister that she had to help out her younger sister, because God always forgives.

The mother would use the story of the prodigal son as a test case.

At the funeral the older sister wanted to know if this was true.

The Prodigal son is such a good story because there are so many ways to understand it and read it.

You can see things through the lens of the father, the forgive son, or the older son.

The father in the story is ready and eager to forgive.

I like to think this is how God is with all of us.

That even if we squander the inheritance given to us that God cannot wait to welcome us back.

In the story I most easily identify with the prodigal son.

I am always thankful for God’s forgiveness of me.

But if God is eager and willing to forgive us, the relationship between the two sons is more complicated.

I have found that this is true.

That forgiveness between two people is more messy and harder to come by than the forgiveness offered by God.

The older son had the most to lose in this story.

When the younger son asks for his inheritance we are not talking about dad cashing in his 401k.

We are talking about the father selling family land in order to give to his son.

Think about how important land is the story of the Bible.

It is this land that God promised Abraham, and then Moses.

It is this land that brings wealth and comfort.

The father was going to die sooner than the older son and so selling the land for him was not as big a deal.

But the older son was hoping that land would continue to bring the family wealth and security for years to come.

And now they had to sell it for the little punk who wanted to go off and party.

He is not so willing to forgive.

Notice that the story ends on a cliff hanger.

Will the older son go inside to the party?

We have to draw our own conclusion.

Or it is left for us to decide what will we do when we are wronged?

I would like to think that the brothers eventually mended their ways.

However, it doesn’t happen just because that is what we are supposed to do.

I found it interesting that the father doesn’t say to the older son, “Look I forgive your brother and so should you.”

Perhaps God knows that the forgiveness that forged between us is always harder, and fought for more deeply.

I would like to believe that the younger brother does ask his older brother for forgiveness.

And then maybe the older brother thinks that maybe he will forgive him, but that he had to prove himself.

The younger brother had to prove that he was willing to work just as hard as he would.

That is the thing about our forgiveness with each other; it takes work, both from the person asking forgiveness and the person offering it.

I would have offered forgiveness to the seminary student, but he didn’t ask for it.

And it was beside the point, because I thought he needed to learn a lesson about the way that you communicate in the Church.

That you don’t make unilateral decisions, but you ask what other people think, that you go through proper channels.

That is a hard lesson to learn.

It is one that I constantly have to relearn myself.

There can be forgiveness to those priests who molested little children, but not from the hierarchy of the Church.

It has to come through the hard work of being in the room with the person you hurt, and let them tear at you.

And perhaps you have to go to jail first to understand just how bad your sin was.

It seems that sometimes we want to skip a step.

We want to skip the step that it is hardest.

And that is to examine why we did what we did, and to make a plan for change, to agree to earn back trust.

We can’t cut out the most important the step of actually asking for forgiveness.

In the story the father he doesn’t need any of that stuff.

He doesn’t care why or how his son is back, he is just happy to have him back.

And that is the beauty and mystery of God’s grace freely given to us.

But we are not God.

We need that other human stuff that happens.

In this way I am like the older brother.

You need to do the work with me if you want my forgiveness.

I would offer to you this morning that this is indeed a healthy and good thing for all of us.

It is spiritually healthy to actually have to say the words to someone else, “I need you to forgive me for this or that.”

I have noticed that most of us don’t do that.

We instead offer non apologies-apologies.

“I regret that my words/actions offended others….”

That is not the same things as saying, “I know I messed up and I need you to forgive me.”

In lent we think a lot about our relationship with God.

Our relationship with God is always good because God is running to offer us forgiveness and throw us a party.

But it is also a good time to think about our relationships with each other.

If we are the younger brother we should remember the important work of asking for forgiveness.

And if we are the older brother the hard work of forgiving.

Amen

Interpreting Scripture!

In the last eight weeks we have been talking about making sense of scripture in our adult forum class.

We have been talking about ways to read and interpret scripture.

This morning I would like to use our Gospel as a way to talk about how we interpret scripture.

This morning we are told two about two incidents that happen, and how they should be understood.

The first is about an incident when Pilate kills some Galileans and mingles it their blood with sacrifices.

The second is about the tower of Siloam that falls and kills eighteen people.

What I found is that most people were brought up to believe that the Bible is telling us history.

And the Bible does include historical times and places.

But the Bible is not about history, it is about theology.

It is about telling how God interacts with us.

These two incidents that are talked about in our text today have no verifiable historical evidence.

Meaning nowhere in any other historical documents do we have any proof that they happened.

They seem like pretty significant things that they would have gotten at least some notice from other historical writers of the time.

Let me offer this to you this morning.

It doesn’t matter.

Luke’s point in telling those stories are not about history they are about theology.

Luke here is attempting to wrestle with an age old theological issue.

What causes human suffering?

In some parts of scripture and in some of our minds our suffering is related to our sin.

Some people believe that when we suffer it is because we have sinned.

Our suffering is divine retribution for what we have done wrong in our lives.

Luke wants to dispute this.

Do you think that these people suffered in this way because they were worse off than anyone else?

No.

But Luke does not leave it there.

Luke goes on to say that our lives should be about constant repentance.

A life of faith demands of us recognition of our failures to live up to God’s demands, but there is not a straight line between our sin and the bad things that might happen to us in this life.

So what is more important the historical accuracy of Luke’s presentation, or the theological insight that we can get from his telling of the story?

Does it matter if those two incidents happen?

Or does it matter what God has to say to us about how our suffering is handled by God?

Let me ask it a different way.

What matters to you more?

That this story is historically accurate?

Or how Jesus answers the age old question about human suffering?

Let us apply Luke’s story to a modern day example.

I lived in New York shortly after the events of 9/11.

I talked a lot about this issue with people who lost loved ones, or people who were spared that day.

For example, the driver of the Hearst for our local funeral home who lost his son that fateful day who told me, “I will never be over the pain of that day.”

The woman who was supposed to be working in the towers right on the floor where the first plane hit who for the first day in her life called in sick that day.

She was on a conference call with her colleagues when the plane hit the tower.

The question that Jesus is asking this morning is, “Do you think that people that died where less sinful than the people that lived on 9/11”?

The answer I think is obvious, “no”.

There was a member of the congregation that I served in who died in the towers that day.

He was a fireman who was running into a building everyone else was running out of it.

He was the father of two young children, a friend, a son, a brother.

Was he more or less sinful than others who didn’t die because they ran away from the buildings?

Of course not.

Jesus is able to help us make sense of something in our lives that really makes no sense.

In a way that is what I hear Jesus partly saying, “Life has random events that don’t make sense.”

Ruthless despot rulers go and kill innocent people.

Towers fall and kill innocent people.

Luke is a genius.

Think of how sophisticated his theology is here.

He holds two things in tension.

On the one hand there is no direct correlation between bad things that happen to us and our sin, on the other hand our lives need to be about constant repentance.

That is not the end of what he has to say.

It is not merely that life is random and makes no sense.

It is that the only way to survive in such a world is to be in constant contact with God.

It is to live a life full of repentance and forgiveness.

Jesus is suggesting that there are worse things in life than dying.

To live a life without being moored to God is worse than dying.

That is what the Bible ultimate gives to us.

It is a deep and lasting relationship with God.

And this relationship is about repenting, and receiving the grace and mercy of God.

Jesus tells a parable about a tree that is not bearing fruit, but is given another year by the Gardner.

It is a year in which the Gardner will tenderly care for the tree.

This parable is about the paradoxical nature of our relationship with God.

That there is a demand in our lives for constant repentance and bearing fruit, but there is a tender Gardner waiting to help us to grow and flourish and bear good fruit.

And that is always the way I want us to look at scripture.

It is not a book of history, or science.

It is a book about how God interacts with us.

How God loves and cares for us.

In our lives there might be times when we forget this.

There might be times when we think that we have to behave or else God will get us.

There might be times when we are going through something horrible and we think it is God’s way of punishing us.

There might be times when we are not bearing fruit and need God to help us on our way.

And in those times there is the word of God which nurtures us, comforts us, challenges us, and leads us to a relationship with God that is deep and wide.

It is a relationship that can be sustained in difficult times, in times of great sorrow, and in times of great joy.

Let me end by saying one other lesson that we learned in our adult forum these past couple of weeks.

You can’t know scripture without having a relationship to it.

If we just go by what we see on television, or by what the pastor tells us, or by what we think scripture is about we will miss the beauty and wonder of it.

We will miss knowing about our God who forgives our sins, who cares for us in difficult times, who nurtures us and helps us grow so we can bear fruit.

To know scripture is to read it, study it, hear it, and then apply it to our lives.

The word of God is always living and breathing and helping us to know God better.

It is living because our lives are constantly in dialogue with it.

Today may you have a deep, lasting, and living relationship with the word of God.

So you can live a life of repentance and receiving the mercy of God.

So you might now that God cares for you.

Amen