Jul 31, 2016 - We are familied by oak trees and crate myrtles, aquatic turtles, and eight legged spiders, by whale shark
“GUARDING GRACE” HOSEA 11:1-11; LUKE 12: 13-21 GRACE COVENANT PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ASHEVILLE, NC July 31, 2016 The Rev. Dr. Marcia Mount Shoop, Pastor The summer of 2016 keeps bringing us reasons to feel terrorized, it threatens to rupture our intuitions of grace. Grace is God’s love around us, within us, transforming us no matter the situation. But the summer of 2016 is trying to tell us there is no such thing, there is no sanctuary, no sacred space where violence abates, and grace abides. The summer of 2016 has told us the story of terror too many times. When we gather as beloved community each week we must remind each other of the inviolable nature of grace—we must remind ourselves that God guards grace with a power like no other. God is guarding grace even now—so that it can never be extinguished, so that it will ALWAYS be loose in this world. We need each other to remember that, to embody that, to trust that. It is not just the preacher who proclaims the Good News. It is all of us. We proclaim the Good News just by showing up at church—by believing it matters, there is hope, that love is a real force in this world. We embody good news, we sing good news. And so today, I invite you to join me in this sermon, in this proclamation of grace. Help me proclaim the good news of God’s abiding love. We will sing to each other this morning—the refrain is right there for you. Listen as the choir introduces us to the refrain and then we will sing together. Brothers and sisters, we must not surrender to the terror of our times, God is guarding grace. SONG listed in bulletin, sing here 2x (choir first, congregation second) How often do you stop and remember where you come from, what you come from, how you came to be? No matter the circumstances of your unique beginnings, you are breathtaking. You are one of a kind. And you are sistered, brothered, mothered, fathered by everything that is. You bear witness to God’s intricacy, to the Spirit’s imagination, and to Christ’s mysterious power to manifest in all things, even in flesh, blood, and bones. You are the offspring of stars, starts born from an ingathering of gases and dust that found their way to each other millions, even billions, of years ago. Those stars are the ancestors of the oxygen we breathe, those stars are our ancestors.
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And that oxygen carries life across time and space. Billions of years of inherited, shared, and recycled oxygen gives you and me life. Every single breath we take tells the story of our connection to dinosaurs and dolphins and amazon rain forests and our grandmother/grandfather stars. We are familied by oak trees and crate myrtles, aquatic turtles, and eight legged spiders, by whale sharks and chickadees. Water is our most dominant character trait—it defines over half of everything about us –from our watery cells to our fluid bones. Your muscles are flowing rivers of strength; your lungs are ocean tides of in and out. Your body comes from a long ago and right now song of creation. It is God’s song, our Creator, sung out from the depths of an infinity we drink and eat and breathe every day. Our creating God coaxes all things, including you and me and us into our unique existence. Far from a random accident in this big world, we are immersed, imprinted, imbued, instilled with the fingerprints of God. How often do you stop and remember where you come from? You come from a magnificent, beautiful yearning to love, create, and connect. Brothers and sisters, remember where you come from, you come from God. SONG Hosea cried out to his world in a desperate time, in a time of strife and bitter divisions. His was a time of corruption—economic, religious, political. Hosea speaks to a generation of leaders whose top priority was protecting their own interest---no matter what that cost anyone else. Hosea cries out against those who were using God as a chess piece in their game of securing personal advantage. It was a world where many had forgotten where they come from, a world where people cut their own deals and counted their own fortune. Hosea’s world was a world of violence. After the peaceful rule of King Jeroboam, 5 of the 6 kings who ascended the throne after him were assassinated or died some other violent death. Hosea cries out to a generation of rebellion and abuse. And he reminds them that no matter how far they try to separate themselves, no matter how rebellious they are, the cords of God’s steady love keep them connected to their Divine source.
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The Deuteronomic law of Hosea’s time states the legal right of a parent to violently punish a rebellious child. But God’s love is not beholden to a legalistic system of accountability. Love transcends rebelliousness, injustices, and even legalized abuse. God chooses love, God chooses healing—even when God’s children are oblivious or even obstinate toward to this healing, to this grace. God’s love is so tenacious, so steady, so eternal, that we cannot separate ourselves from it. God’s love is a promise that won’t be broken, that can’t be broken. In times like these, God has not vacated our lives, our country, our planet, God is leaning in to draw us closer, to care, to remind us that God is here. _______________________________________ I re-member that feeling. I can see black phone with the spiraled cord hanging from a wooden table my grandfather made with his own hands. It sits next to the wall I can see over my mother’s shoulder and the back of a wooden rocker. I hear the sound of the rocking chair runners rolling across the hard wood floor. I hear the whir of a fan and the vibration of my mother’s soft singing intermingled between hums and pat pats on my back. It is an un-lonely place of deep connection. Brothers and sisters, we are not left trembling, we are not alone. God will not let us go. SONG Luke’s gospel speaks to an insecure people, a people searching for a way to make life feel less unpredictable, less painful. Jesus says, “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed! One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Jesus tells a story about a man who stores up his riches, a man who thinks capital and wealth and possessions are his ticket to security, to being ok. The wealthy man thinks he has the perfect plan for long-term peace of mind and enjoyment of life.
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“You fool!” God says, “This very night your life is being demanded of you.” Invest in your relationship with God, not your relationship with things. God is your life source, your security system, your insurance policy, your bank account, your wealth portfolio. We may distort the source and course of our peace of mind in life, but God resists such mistaken identity. Justice and resistance are love’s right and left hands—love activates when it encounters injustice. Resistance kicks in when it brushes up against despair. A mother, enslaved in the American south, separated from her child by a business transaction. A shake of the hand and an exchange of property between so-called southern gentlemen meant that she would be like a stranger to her young son. Mr. Stewart’s place, where she was a field hand, was 12 miles from where her son lived. Field hands reported at sunrise and were whipped if they were not there on time. After a long days’ work, this tired mother walked the twelve miles to her sleeping son. She held him in the night and well before sunrise she was gone. As an adult, her son said, “I never saw my mother to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life.” “I never knew a mother’s soothing presence.” The distortions and oppression of slavery conspired to tell him he never knew a mother’s love, but her fierce love moved her feet 24 miles in the dark just to hold him close. No doubt that love helped form him into the man he would become, Fredrick Douglas. She held him in the night. Her love imprinted in him a profound resistance to the injustice of slavery. She risked herself to love him. And he found the courage to be one of the most powerful abolitionists and orators against slavery ever to live. God’s love is a resisting, repairing, healing, transforming love. Holding us in the night even when we struggle to see evidence of God’s presence in the light of day. God guards grace against the tyranny of terror, against the conspiracy of exile, against the lies of individualism, against the distortions of greed and oppression. Brothers and sisters, remember where you come from, and remember whose you are, and remember the sounds, the sensations of a grace and love that can’t be bound. SONG Thanks be to God.
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