Dylan's sermons

"God's Year to Act"

A sermon for a service of U2charist sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan, Journey of Faith Church, and Christ Episcopal Church, and held at Christ Episcopal Church in Dearborn, Michigan, June 16, 2007

Isaiah 58:6-12; Psalm 40:1-11; 2 Corinthians 8:1-15; Luke 4:14-21

It’s great to be back in Michigan, where I’ve got good friends, new friends, and a great deal of history. I was born in Southfield, just a few miles from here, but I spent my teenage years in Los Angeles. And like a lot of people in sunny southern California, I learned to surf. I loved it, but wasn’t at all good at it, especially at first. I got a lot better almost instantly, though, when I finally got one insight that’s absolutely fundamental for surfing.

I imagine that even if you haven’t surfed yourself, you’ve seen enough surfing in movies and such to know pretty much how it goes: You take your surfboard to the beach. You paddle out to where the swells are forming. When a swell comes along that looks like it’s going to be a good wave, you start paddling. Once you’ve caught the wave, you can stand up and ride it.

There’s a common misconception, though, among beginning surfers about the role of paddling in that process. When I first tried surfing, I thought that it was the force of my paddling that propelled the board such that I could catch a wave. The harder I was finding it to catch a wave, the more frantically I paddled. I ended up with very sore shoulders and hardly any rides. Then I started to think what propelled the board was a current in the water, and I got very frustrated not being able to find this magical current on any given wave.

But then finally someone explained to me what really propels your board in surfing. It’s GRAVITY. A wave is a moving hill, and as long as you’re on a slick surface pointed downhill, you’re going to slide forward. Catching a wave is just a matter of lining yourself up with the wave so that you’re pointed downhill, and continuing to ride it is just a matter of pointing your board just close enough to parallel to the shore so that as the wave continues to break, you continue sliding downhill without reaching the bottom.

In other words, surfing is basically well-planned falling. It’s aligning yourself with what’s going on in the ocean and with the forces operating in the world -- gravity, friction, and so on -- such that the most natural way forward becomes an exhilarating ride. I still pretty much suck at surfing, so I’ve only caught that perfect ride a couple of times, but I can say even based on those couple of times that it’s an amazing feeling. You’re in touch with these elemental forces, and there’s something that feels very wild and powerful about that, but being aligned with them, there’s also something profoundly peaceful about it. Noise and distractions, including all of those self-conscious thoughts and anxieties, melt away into one feeling of "YES"!

I’d say that there’s no feeling like it in the world, except that I believe there is. Engaging God’s mission of justice for the poor can feel a lot like it. Let me put it this way:

The perfect wave is starting to swell in this world, and being aligned with it is one heck of a ride.

What do I mean by that? Take a look at the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs. Eight points:
1) Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
2) Achieve universal primary education.
3) Promote gender equality and empower women.
4) Reduce child mortality.
5) Improve maternal health.
6) Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases.
7) Ensure environmental sustainability.
8) Develop a global partnership for development.

Eight points to change the world. And we’re talking about a big change. Here’s how things are now in this world. Right now, more than a billion of the world’s people live on less than a dollar a day. Right now, one child every three seconds -- 30,000 children a day, 11 million children a year -- die of preventable diseases. Half a million women die every year while giving birth. 2.6 billion people don’t have access to basic sanitation that would allow them to stay healthy. I will never forget the images of those caught in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I never want to forget that there are billions of people in the world for whom every day of their lives is like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

It’s what Bono, U2’s lead singer, calls “stupid poverty,” because it could be eliminated if just seven-tenths of one percent more of the wealth of the richest nations went toward sensible development in the poorest. Stupid poverty. It’s stupid because we let all of this heartbreak happen when it wouldn’t happen if we put our hearts and our heads together.

Right now, the U.S. spends more than THIRTEEN TIMES more on defense than on aid. Right now, our government is not fulfilling the commitments it made previously. Americans are generous in their charitable giving, but only two percent of Americans’ charitable giving goes outside the borders of the U.S., and we tend to give it haphazardly, when someone asks, or when a crisis reaches our T.V.s. A recent study by Claude Rosenberg and Tim Stone (Note 1) showed that if U.S. citizens budgeted in charitable giving to address the Millennium Development Goals -- if we figured out what we could afford and gave it regularly, instead of writing a check haphazardly, as someone asked for it -- American charitable giving would go up by ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS a year.

One hundred billion. I’m not a numbers person myself. That sounds awfully abstract. So how about this:

Nineteen billion dollars a year between now and the year 2015 could ELIMINATE starvation and malnutrition from this world.

Twelve billion dollars a year between now and the year 2015 could give every child in this world an education through primary school.

Fifteen billion dollars a year from now through the year 2015 would provide access to clean water and sanitation for everyone in this world.

Nineteen plus twelve plus fifteen. That’s forty-six billion dollars a year -- less than HALF of what planning to give and following through with those plans would generate if every American did that.

If we make that commitment and follow through on it, then, in the year 2015, everyone gets enough nutritious food to eat. Everyone gets access to clean water. And every child gets an education, EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD. Three of those eight goals met with American people like you and me planning to give what we can and then following through on those plans. And then there’s what would happen if our government followed through on the commitments it’s already made. Just seven-tenths of a percent more in intelligent, coordinated aid for development -- in putting our hearts and heads together -- and the Millennium Development Goals are more than achievable.

I’m going to turn 45 in the year 2015. Most of us in this room will still be around then. And I would love to come back here in the summer of 2015 for a party where all of us can get together and say, “Hey, remember when we all got together and sang U2 songs all night? Yeah, and we decided to join this movement -- to step up, to tell our friends, to call our senators and our representatives? Remember back in 2007, when we said we were going to have this party in eight years?”

And then we can lean over to any kids at that party who are too young to remember what it was like in 2007, and we can say, “You know, there was poverty then. Back then, there were kids who died of malaria because they didn’t have a $3 mosquito net. In 2007, there were girls who couldn’t go to school because they had to spend all day carrying water from the river, and back then people got sick from drinking the only water they had to drink after all that work.” And there are going to be some kids at that party in 2015 who are going to say, “NO WAY,” because they live in a world in which none of those things happen any more, and they just don’t remember that they ever did.

That is going to be some party, sisters and brothers. That is going to be some party all over the world, where every one of us can tell the story of what it was like then, and what you did -- and what you did -- what all of us did -- that changed the world forever.

So I hope you don’t mind if right now I invite myself to that party in 2015. I hope you’ll invite yourself to it right now too. And I hope that you and I will spend the next eight years inviting everyone who will listen to that party. Can I get an Amen?

That’s what I’m talking about. That’s the wave we’re going to ride. In our gospel for tonight’s service, we heard Jesus telling everyone in his hometown synagogue what his mission in the world was. He said:

God's Spirit is on me;
he's chosen me to preach the Message of good news to
the poor,
Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and
recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the burdened and battered free,
to announce, "This is God's year to act!"

God’s Spirit is on me, because God has chosen me to preach the message of good news to the poor. Christ’s mission in the world. This is what God does in the world when God becomes flesh and dwells among us. Christ’s mission.

And we -- you and you and you and I -- are the Body of Christ. We are the very body of Jesus in the world. We have on us the Spirit that Jesus sent to every one of us. That’s why I know that when you hear what God is doing in the world -- what Good News for the poor there is -- there’s a part of you that feels the excitement of that perfect wave when it starts to swell. Here it comes. There’s a part of you that says, “YES!” You are the Body of Christ in the world. God’s Spirit is on you because God has chosen you to bring good news to the poor. Chosen YOU. Anointed YOU. Given YOU the gifts of the Spirit to prophesy -- to speak truth to power, to invite everyone you know and even people you don’t know, or don’t know yet, to that party we are going to have on that day when every one of us can say, “the scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing!” YOU are the Body of Christ, chosen and gifted to ride the wave of the mission of Christ in the world. What can one person do? I don’t know, but I know what the One Body of Christ can do because God’s Spirit is upon you. It requires your generosity and it requires your voice. But this isn’t momentum that you have to create by yourself with frantic occasional paddling. This is a WAVE, and what your calls and your letters and your generosity are going to do is line you up to ride it.

God’s Spirit is upon you because God has chosen you to bring Good News to the poor.

That’s what the invitation to this party looks like, and I want to invite every person here right now to invite one or two of the people around you to it. I want to invite you to turn to someone next to you, put your hand on their shoulder if you both feel comfortable with that, to look that person in the eye, and say:
God’s Spirit is upon you because God has chosen you to bring Good News to the poor.
Right now.

[The congregation does this.]

God’s Spirit is upon me because God has chosen me to bring Good News to the poor.

Write that on a note and put it on your bathroom mirror to see in the morning and at night. Put it in your wallet to see when you pull out a credit card. Send a note to your friends from this service in a few weeks to remind them. Pick up the information from the ONE Episcopalian campaign. Pick it up, plan to line yourself up to ride this wave, follow through, and ride it!

This is God’s year to act! Surf's up!

Thanks be to God.

---

Notes:

1 - "A New Take on Tithing," Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2006

Sarah Dylan Breuer coined the term "U2charist" and, with the Without Walls network for alternative liturgy in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, created the first U2charist service, held in April of 2004 in Baltimore, Maryland.

"Touching the Wounded Body of Christ in the World": Second Sunday of Easter, Year A

St. Martin's-in-the-Field Episcopal Church
Second Sunday of Easter, Year A; April 3, 2005
Genesis 8:6-16; 9:8-16; Psalm 111; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

There’s something that makes me want to chuckle whenever I hear John 20:24’s description of Thomas as the one “who was called ‘the twin,’” because let’s face it: who calls him that now? He’s got another nickname, by which he’s much better known among Christians today, and that’s “Doubting Thomas.”

I think that Thomas needs a better press agent, and I’m ready to apply for the job.

First off, I think the “Doubting” label is pretty unfair. Yes, Thomas wants to touch Jesus. But who wouldn’t? A lot of us feel that way. One of my favorite worship songs (the Wild Goose Worship Group's "Don't Tell Me of a Faith That Fears," from Love + Anger) has a chorus that goes like this:

I need to know that God is real
I need to know that Christ can feel
the need to touch and love and heal
the world including me

That experience of knowing – really knowing – that Christ is alive, still able to touch and love and heal, is something we want and need, especially when times are dark and uncertain. And for Jesus’ followers in this morning’s gospel, the times feel VERY uncertain.

They’ve had a terrifying series of experiences. They saw Jesus arrested and led away without resistance. The ones who were brave enough to watch saw him crucified. And then Peter and John saw that Jesus’ tomb was empty. This wouldn’t be a reassuring sight to someone living in the first-century Roman Empire. If anyone had seen them around the tomb, Jesus’ followers would have been suspected of grave robbery – a crime that carried a death sentence in first-century law.

Small wonder that, at the beginning of this morning’s gospel, Jesus’ followers are gathered secretly, behind locked doors, for fear of the Judean authorities. As possible grave robbers, they were suspected of a capital crime; as known followers of a man brazen enough to conduct a public demonstration in the Temple courts, in full view of the Roman garrison stationed there, the disciples would be considered highly dangerous to the peace of Rome, and to the Judean leaders Rome supported. So the question on the minds of Jesus’ followers is probably not so much “will we be next?” as it is, “how long do you think we can last?” So to reach them, breathe his spirit on them, and commission them to serve as agents of his forgiveness, Jesus has to come through the locked door behind which they’re all hiding.

Well, ALMOST all of them are hiding. One of them is not. Thomas is not with those cowering in the locked room when Jesus appears to them. And so Thomas doesn’t see Jesus, doesn’t experience Jesus’ breathing on his followers, doesn’t receive the commission the risen Jesus gives the others.

Does this mean that Thomas is less faithful than the other disciples? Not necessarily. In the appearance of the risen Jesus that Thomas misses, Jesus commissions his disciples to go out into the world, forgiving as he forgives. I like to think that Thomas wasn’t present to hear those words because he, unlike the others, was not locked inside in fear, but was already out there, in the world.

Thomas, the disciple who wants to touch Jesus, is onto something:

The path of discipleship isn’t a path of safety. Thomas gets that. Heck, he’s the guy who way back in chapter 11 of John says, “let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16). Thomas knows that there are worse things than death – like maybe not ever really living at all. Because Thomas is not ruled by fear, he’s out there in the world, while the other disciples are hiding behind locked doors. Thomas doesn’t need to hear Jesus’ commission to the other disciples because he’s already out in the place where he can fulfill it. There’s a gorgeous passage in a short story by Sara Maitland ("Dragon Dreams," from Angel Maker) that I think of when I think of the kind of courage that I can almost imagine as Thomas’ words:

When [you] died I knew that there was no safety, anywhere, and I will not sacrifice to false gods. There is no safety, but there is wildness and joy, there is love and life within the danger. I love you. I want to be with you. ... I refuse to believe that we only get one chance. This letter is just a start. I am going to hunt you down now in all the lovely desolate places of the world. ... there I will be waiting for you. Please come. Please come soon.

There was danger out there, but the hope of seeing something else out there was stronger. So Thomas doesn’t need to hear Jesus’ commission to the other disciples because he’s already out in the place where he can fulfill it. He is ruled more by hope than by fear, and so he gets it. He knows that a disciple’s place is in the world.

And Thomas is onto something even more important:

The risen Jesus, the REAL Jesus, is the wounded Jesus. If you want to see the real Jesus, if you want to KNOW that Jesus is alive and at work in the world to touch and heal, look for the wounds. The wounds are the surest sign that this stranger is really the risen Christ. Seek them yourself, crying out with Thomas, “My lord and my God!” Thomas gets that. He gets that he’s going to know the risen Christ when he seeks to touch the wounded Christ. Maybe that truth also helps to ground him as he goes out into a dangerous world.

But there’s something about the report the other disciples give Thomas that seems to throw him off. Thomas starts with a presupposition that’s spot on: there is one Body of Christ. But he assumes that even in the life of the resurrection, there’s only one place or one way to see Jesus. If the other disciples saw Jesus, then Thomas missed his chance. If they received the Spirit in that encounter, then Thomas is left empty.

Not so. Thomas thinks that the unity of Christ’s body and the fact of Christ’s uniqueness means that the body he wants and needs to touch, the body of the risen Christ, is the body that had been nailed to the cross. But it’s not like that. Not any more. All of Christ’s followers can touch the wounded Body of Christ because Christ’s risen Body consists of every one of us – every baby, every grandmother, every teenager, every woman and man and child – who is in Christ has been baptized into the Body of Christ.

Every time we take someone’s hand as we exchange the Peace, we touch the risen, living Body of Christ.

A lot of us have had that experience here, at St. Martin’s. Around shared joys or tragedies, watching a row of women wearing goofy sunglasses on Joy Sunday to celebrate their surviving life-threatening illness, in a casserole in an hour of need from a friend or someone we barely know, in a moment of shared vulnerability in the Commit class or over a cup of coffee, we’ve seen and served the risen, wounded, triumphant Christ.

And the temptation, when we’ve seen Christ in one way, in one community, in one person or set of people, is to look for Christ only in those places. I think that’s why Jesus says, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” Living things grow, and change. And the body of the risen Lord is changed and changing too. Discipleship is a moving target. Our mission in Christ is calling us out, into the world, to touch Christ’s wounds in brothers and sisters we haven’t yet met, but whose fellowship we share in the mystery of this table, and of the prayers of the saints.

But do you want to feel Christ’s presence even more deeply? Do you want to have an experience of God’s Spirit moving so deeply within you that every fiber and sinew inside wants to cry out, “My Lord and My God!”? Do you need to know that God is real? Do you need to know that Christ is alive, that sin and death itself are not the last word, but are passing away? Do you need to experience Christ’s presence? Do you want to touch Jesus, and KNOW that Jesus is really right there with you?

Then hear Jesus’ commission to those upon whom he breathes his spirit: you are being sent out, into the world, and specifically to the world’s brokenness. You are being sent to TOUCH those places, to proclaim and participate in the reconciliation and healing that is Christ’s work in the world. You are being sent because YOU -- each one of us about to gather at Jesus’ table here, and at every other table at which bread is being broken in remembrance of him -- are now the Body of Christ, Jesus’ presence at work in the world, called and empowered to do what he did, and more.

If we want to know that, if we want to experience that, we’ll have to leave the rooms we lock ourselves in because of fear. We need to do what Thomas did – step out from our locked rooms, our gated communities, into the world. We need to insist upon touching Christ’s wounds. When we try to sequester ourselves and our children away from the world’s pain, we are hiding them and ourselves from Christ’s wounds.

And the world is filled with wounded members of the Body of Christ. One million deaths every year, one child dead every thirty seconds, from MALARIA, a disease that can be prevented with a mosquito net costing two dollars and fifty cents. The life expectancy in Botswana is down to 30 years old. One in five people in the world survive – or don’t survive – on less than a dollar a day. One person in seven tries to stay alive without access to clean water. A child dies in extreme poverty every three seconds. 36.3% – over one third– of all the children in Baltimore City live below the poverty line.

So much death. Such deep wounds. And yet. And yet. AND YET.
This is Christ’s Body, given for the world. Christ is here among us, despite our locked doors and our security systems. And there is life, and peace, and POWER breathed upon us to do Christ’s work in the world, to carry Good News of resurrection throughout the world. In Christ and through Christ and with Christ, all of Creation is being redeemed, coming to new and abundant life.

What can one person do to heal the world’s wounds? I don’t know, if we’re talking about a hypothetical person, a stranger, nobody in particular. But I know what Jesus can do. We can read about the signs of Jesus’ power and how Jesus used that power in the Bible. But these signs were recorded not to provide us with something to read as we wait behind locked doors, but to inspire us to experience the life of the risen Christ by living as Christ’s Body in the world, touching, loving, healing, forgiving in Christ’s name and to Christ’s glory.

So let the gospel come alive
  in actions plain to see
  in imitation of the one
  whose love extends to me

 

I need to know that God is real
  I need to know that Christ can feel
  the need to touch and love and heal
  the world including me
-- "Don't Tell Me of a Faith That Fears"

The risen, living Body of Christ is in the world – breathing peace, bringing healing, and sending us forth, in love and in power. Thanks be to God!

"Repentance and Grace" - March 14, 2004

Third Sunday in Lent, Year C
Exodus 3:1-15; Luke 13:1–9

The message of these two linked passages in today’s gospel – Jesus’ comment on arbitrary deaths and the parable of the unproductive fig tree – is clearly proclaimed by headers for this section in many bibles: “Repent or Perish.” Or is it? I don’t find that reading entirely satisfactory.

“Repent or perish” doesn’t work for me as a summary of today’s gospel first and foremost because those in power in these stories are not like God; they pay no regard for who is penitent or unrepentant. Pilate slaughters Galilean pilgrims who had committed no crime. This portrayal of Pilate agrees with what we know of him from other first-century sources, most notably Josephus: Pilate was a brutal ruler who did not hesitate to kill hundreds or even thousands at a time, especially when he thought it might make an example to dissuade others from causing trouble.

It’s a helpful corrective to the kind of portrait drawn of Pilate in places like Mel Gibson's The Passion as a principled but waffling man who is deeply concerned with whether Jesus is innocent. In this Sunday's gospel, Jesus (who himself is a Galilean) uses Pilate as an example of how oppressive Rome's rule could be, how arbitrary the “powers that be” in Palestine used their power. He notes specifically that the Galileans Pilate slaughtered were as innocent as any of their countrymen. Pilate came down on them like a ton of bricks, as it were; he didn’t check to see who was guilty and who was penitent any more than the tower in Siloam did before it fell. Indeed, it’s likely that the Galileans Pilate murdered WERE penitent, that what brought them out of Galilee, where Pilate had no authority, and into Jerusalem, where they died, was specifically their repentance. They were pilgrims, not tourists; they were in Jerusalem to offer the sacrifices required of the penitent. Repent or perish? More like “repent AND perish.” Pontius Pilate didn’t stop to ask whether those he killed were good or penitent any more than the collapse of a tower does, or a virus, or a cancer.

Luke continues with the theme of unjust and capricious authority in the parable of the fig tree. The historians K.C. Hanson and Douglas Oakman (p. 106) present the setting as one that pops up repeatedly in Luke: the estate of a wealthy landowner – only the wealthy owned land worked by hired hands in Jesus’ and Luke’s society. The landowner mostly lives amidst the comforts and more cosmopolitan environment of the city while his staff and tenant farmers run the estate. In this parable, the gardener knows how to grow figs; like many peasants in Galilee, his family has grown them for sustenance for generations. The wise gardener counsels patience, letting the fig tree live. But the authority the gardener faces is not so wise. The landowner, whose ignorance of how fig trees are customarily handled is shown in his desire to cut down the tree rather than dig it out, as would usually be done, is inclined to kill the tree immediately. It was a common situation in first-century Palestine; wealthy and absentee landowners were eager to move on to crops like grapes or olives, which were more valuable for trade. But these crops were of far less use to the poorer people who actually planted, cared for, and harvested them. Although they paid exorbitant rents for the chance to work the land, they still could not control how it would be used; all they could do was to try to persuade the landowner to do what was best for the community. And the choice of a fig tree is also significant in this parable. In the Hebrew bible, the fig tree was often used as a symbol for Israel. In the languishing fig tree under threat from an authority not of the land, the audience would recognize Israel's own precarious situation, subject to the whims of an authority that, especially in contrast to the gardener, is not shown as being particularly reasonable.

That’s one reason the parable doesn’t quite work as an allegory for God’s judgment. God isn’t an absentee landlord who’s going to decide to sell out when it profits him most, any more than God is a capricious and brutal ruler like Pontius Pilate. The two stories in today’s gospel don’t reflect God’s character so much as they reflect the character of the world we build when we set unjust rulers above us, or when we ourselves use our power in ways that fail to care for the poor and vulnerable as God does.

We live in a world with a lot of pain. Millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, and in Haiti, and in North America are infected with HIV, a virus that does not know or discriminate between the righteous and the unrighteous, the penitent and the unrepentant. The commuters in Madrid who died in the bomb attack last week weren’t any more or less sinful than anyone else. And then there’s all of the suffering that doesn’t make the headlines – illnesses like depression, or M.S., or Parkinson’s, or cancer. None of these are punishment for wrongdoing, and penitence neither prevents nor cures them.

So the first reason that “repent or perish!” doesn't work for me as the overriding theme of this Sunday’s gospel is that being penitent doesn’t seem to be any guarantee of not perishing. One could say that this is the bad news of the passage – even for those of us fortunate enough not to live under a brutal dictator like Pilate, even if we’re pious and hard-working and we play by the rules, there’s no guarantee in this world that we can avoid tragedy.

But there’s another way in which “repent or perish” doesn’t entirely sum up today’s gospel, and this one is good news: the parable of the fig tree comes up short on the perishing side of the equation. That’s especially clear when we compare today’s gospel in Luke with the cursing of the fig tree in Matthew 21:19. In Matthew, Jesus comes upon a fig tree that isn’t producing fruit, Jesus curses the tree, and it immediately withers and dies. In this Sunday’s gospel, the landowner has waited three years for fruit that didn’t appear, and still the gardener is willing and able to care for the tree and to intercede with the landowner to save it. Not bearing fruit is, in today’s gospel, no guarantee of destruction by the end of the story. Mercy is still possible.

Don’t get me wrong; I definitely think that repentance is a major theme in today’s gospel. We are called to repent. But there’s a flip side to the sense of loss and danger running through this passage. There’s an invitation. Repentance is not entirely about a conviction that transgressions are invariably and immediately punished any more than it’s about a conviction that this world will immediately and invariably reward virtue or repentance. That just doesn’t hold up. Bad things sometimes happen to good people. Good things often happen to people whose conduct doesn’t deserve them. Repentance is not our means to homeland security, to prosperity and physical health. We respond to Jesus’ invitation to repent not as “fire insurance,” to escape suffering in this life or after we die, but as a response to the grace Jesus offers. And the flip side of how indiscriminate disasters and illness can be is that Jesus’ offer of grace is made not just indiscriminately, but universally. The prosperous and the poor, the righteous and the unrighteous, those suffering from illness and the rest of us, the “temporarily able-bodied,” are equally in need of forgiveness and healing. We are equally offered the radical freedom we find in Christ to start over, to stop punishing ourselves and one another for real and imagined transgressions and to get on with living in a way that gives everyone around us – and sometimes even people half a world away – a glimpse of God’s grace.

Every circumstance – every hardship and every blessing – offers opportunities for us to experience grace and to extend it to others. Blessed with abundance, we have the opportunity to share – much as St. Martin’s support of La Resurrection in Haiti extends grace to people born into poverty, affected or infected by HIV, subjected to violence and deprivation. Blessed with an abundance of God’s love, we can take the time to share that abundance with young people in SMART [the parish high school youth group] or MSYG [the parish middle school youth group], and in the process we are blessed all the more richly by young people extending God’s love and exercising their spiritual gifts for the benefit of the church and the world. And there are openings for some adults to do just that in both SMART and MSYG now and next year. It’s not a “do this or perish,” or “do this or the program will perish” thing; it’s a response to the grace we experience and a chance to experience a lot more of it. Our lives are full of such opportunities. When we feel blessed, we share. When we are hurt, we forgive. When we suffer, we give others the opportunity to minister. When we rejoice, we invite our friends, our neighbors, and our enemies to experience our joy. And when we realize that we have missed the mark, that we have done hurtful things and failed to do what’s helpful, that also is a moment of grace. We let go, we ask for forgiveness, and we thank God for the opportunity to start again.

In every moment, the invitation to us springs from grace, from an awareness of how precious this moment is, this life, this mercy, this chance. We’re not just fleeing from future wrath, and we’re not trying to behave in a certain way because of the reward we think we’ll get. We’re embracing God’s mercy in the present. That’s a fruitful life, regardless of our fortunes.

Thanks be to God!