by Brent Gavin Was, Intern Minister

A sermon given November 10, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

This summer, I experienced my first hurdle of the UU ordination process; a regional committee of ministers and lay folk that screen us early on for ministerial potential. I went to the board quite nervous. Some questions had been raised about my scattered career path, my length of UU affiliation, the speed of my ministerial formation process. I went fearfully, for I knew some doubts were present.

As I entered the room, what I had envisioned as some Inquisitional, star-shaped chamber, I was met by seven lovely people, all very dedicated to ministry, Unitarian Universalism, and the welfare of students. It was a light affair. We laughed a bit, I teared up over a question about my family, bantered about theology and history a bit; it was a very UU interview. One member of the board, however, was a bit removed from the lightness of the proceedings. I knew that he had been the one to raise a lot of questions leading up to the interview, so I was wary of him. The interview was coming to an end, everyone was smiling and I felt confident, and the chairwoman said, "Well, I think we have heard all we need, board, are there any last questions?" "Well, yes, I have one more," said the man I had worried about. "Brent, I see your resume, I have read your application and I am concerned … I feel that you struggle with grace in your life. How would you define grace? And how do you think this will affect your ministry in the future."

Everyone gasped slightly and one minister said, "Yeah, we didn’t want to let you off too easy." Grace? Tough question. My first thought was to jump across the table and throttle him, but I decided that that wouldn’t be a very good interpretive dance of what grace means to me. I looked down, "Grace, grace, grace?" I thought, then said, "Yes, I probably do struggle with grace. I don’t think I can define it now, not well enough, and I pray that someday I will."

Grace is knowing that we rest in the arms of love at every moment that we are alive. Grace is the undeserved presence of God within us in our most glorious days and our loneliest of nights. Grace is the guiding light we see when all seems lost, that idea that comes to us in the nick of time, that feeling of not being alone that rescues us from despair. Grace is knowing that while we are not as good as we can be, there is a gentle, unstoppable force that gives us the opportunity to be the good people that we are.

I struggle with grace. With humility and fear and cowardice and shame. With knowing or not knowing what is right or wrong and worrying about how that decision affects others. I wrestle with being a man in love with a woman. I struggle with being a man in a male-dominated world. I am ashamed about what being an American represents while knowing that I am American through and through. I struggle with grace constantly. I am not as good as I can be. I never will be. No one is as good as they can be. But do you know what, I can try. We all can try. Grace gives us the opportunity to try to be as good as we can be, because grace, God’s love, is always present. It is a set of warm, familiar arms that is always ready to greet us.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote, "The power is in the balance: we are as much our injuries as we are our successes." We are complex creatures, not easily categorized as good or bad, right or wrong, pretty or ugly, weak or strong. You could be brave as Lancelot on the field but never have the strength to cry in front of your wife. Strong enough to carry a family’s secrets silently years for years, but unable to muster the strength to grant yourself a little peace, a little rest. Grace comes when we relax enough to realize that we are not alone, we are never alone. Let it wrap itself around your shiny exterior and those hard-to-look-at, not-so-proud-of corners. Let love bring you, the scared hero, to center stage. Through all of those hates and hits, injustices and failures, feel the warmth of love, and with it the truth that you are a good person. That you don’t deserve to be treated poorly. No one deserves to be hated, or shunned or ridiculed. No one deserves to be hit, ever. No one. What we deserve is to be loved, unconditionally. To be respected and nurtured. Loved as the brilliant creations that we each are. Perfect in nothing but our humanness. And by grace, finding the place where you can see that you are not so different, that everyone has those same mean thoughts, has those same habits when we are alone, has secrets that will not be shared, that you too, not in spite of this, but because of it, are deserving of the love of God, the love of each of us here, the love of yourself. This is the grace we all seek, we all desperately need, we all, most certainly, deserve.

Jesus was tempted by the devil; he could have had the world as his playground and I think he was tempted, he was human. But even with temptation in his past, he continued on his mission to teach a different way, to introduce a God of love to the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a flawed man, but graciously accepted his humanity and died saving a nation. Mahatma Gandhi practiced non-violence in large part because he knew that he could never be sure that he was not wrong, and therefore could not risk the eternal sin of unjustified killing. It wasn’t just love that moved him, but knowledge of his own fallibility. Each of these men recognized their own flaws, their transgressions, and they found some way to love themselves enough to forgive and get on with the good work they also had inside of them.

No one is perfect. We each have light in our hearts, the capability to love and laugh and smile and empathize. Good resides in every human being that has ever been. But evil is also present. Evil is real. Each of us here has the capability to be cruel, hateful, jealous, and even violent. We are human and the blessing of being human is that we have a choice to be good or evil. We are in danger when we fail to realize that we are each susceptible to making bad choices, to doing things that on most days we would not, to acting on impulses that lie in every human soul.

Violence in particular is a difficult human subject for me. I have had a strange relationship with violence, as most men have. So many of the role models offered to men in the news, in history, in film and fiction are terrifically violent fellows. From playing tackle football in high school and rugby in college to sitting behind a machine gun in the Marines, violence has been real in my life. But now I struggle with pacifism. I want to be a pacifist, to fully grasp the consequences of murder and to become incapable of taking a life. I want that, but I know myself. I am capable of hurting. Everyone is. If someone was hurting someone I loved, I don’t know if I would be strong enough not to react. I think that killing is wrong, but every time I take up a hoe in my fields, I leave a wake of death and destruction. Any of us that think we don’t have blood on our plates, think again. It takes countless deaths to bring that organic spinach to our mouths.

So what do I do? I am not a violent man. I haven’t been in a fight since 6^th grade. I don’t want to hurt, but I could, any of us could. The countless horrible violent crimes, acts of war, and terrorist attacks in the papers are not conducted by monsters, but by human beings also capable of loving their mothers, having a garden, singing. Good kids from Ohio and Florida were at My Lai in Viet Nam and nice boys drove tanks in Tianammen square. I could have been one of them. I could still be one of them, but the possibility of grace lets me see that that is part of me. Recognizing that grace is possible, that grace is real, that I am not alone, lets me own that I am flawed, but worth working with. In my better moments, grace helps me to understand that while my faults are great, I can forgive myself and realize that my capability for great acts of love are greater than my faults, and are even worth sharing.

There is something greater than we are in the world that affirms life, affirms that humanity is in dire need of love and forgiveness. That each of us here deserves the love of God is not due to the litany of good and evil we have each committed, but due to the miracle of our existence. We are human beings, sons and daughters of this creation, the result of billions of years of evolution that we don’t understand. But we have to recognize that whatever made all of this happen is too powerful, too wise and loving to have left us alone.

The problem with grace is that grace is terribly illusive. I usually remember that I am a good person. I know that I try to do things right, that I feel bad when I don’t measure up to expectations I am held to and expectations I hold myself to. But I amaze myself at how quickly and at how often I forget all that—how many times I wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and think: "What am I doing?" I make some mistake and think: "Who am I kidding, I am just a bad person. I don’t deserve all I have." Do you ever feel this?

We deserve so little of what we have, good and bad. So few of the mistakes and consequences we suffer through are really our fault. I don’t believe we should forget all of our bad decisions, but I also don’t think we should take all the credit for all of our successes either. So much of what we have is based on what we are—race, class, gender, educational level—not on who we are, the individual within those categories. But what I am finding, in thought and prayer and reading and living, is that there is something we don’t deserve, but gladly have. Because we were born in the image of something infinite, we are progeny of a divine spirit, a perfect reflection of the face of creation, whomever or whatever made us possible could not, can not, will not abandon us. God is present in our lives by grace alone.

But where? Many people have come before us and found grace. The world’s religious myth and scripture is full of stories of lost and wounded people finding grace. One of my favorite stories is that of the apostle Paul. Paul, the founder, the builder of the Christian church. The first evangelist is a man of troubling reputation, but also a man whose story can inspire us here in our liberal church.

Paul was a man full of hate. Born in what is now Turkey, his given name was Saul. He began his public life working for the Jewish power holders suppressing religious and political dissenters violently, relentlessly. He was deeply feared by one particular radical sect, followers of an executed Palestinian peasant revolutionary named Jesus. One day he set out to an outlying city to attack a cell of these subversives. Out on the road, a piercing light struck Saul down, and a voice came to him saying "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" He was blinded, literally. He felt the presence of God’s intermediary in the deepest pits of his soul, and he listened. He staggered under a stranger’s care to the homes of the very people he had dedicated himself to destroying. He confessed his sins and put himself at their mercy. In doing so, he not only regained his sight, but grasped a new vision of life, a new image of his own life, and lived his days as a righteous man following his God and his heart as a changed man, the Apostle Paul.

I don’t know if this story happened as told in the Christian Bible, and it doesn’t matter. All religious myth is metaphor—metaphor that is vital to our existence if we can see ourselves in the story. This is a conversion story. Grace came upon Paul. The penetrating power of God’s love transformed this hating, torturing man into someone who could exercise the courage to change his ways. After this experience, he didn’t always do things right. He made a lot of mistakes, but in a moment of openness, grace, the overwhelming presence of the undeserved love of God saved him, and also saved the poor folks he was on the way to persecute.

What is so remarkable about grace is that it often, if not usually, is found in those times when we feel the least deserving of love. When we feel the least able to change. We all have sordid pasts, in some way. We wouldn’t be who we are without having tested some limits, pushed some boundaries along the way. We wouldn’t be human if we hadn’t failed along they way. Grace happens not in spite of our stumbles, but because of them. Grace comes upon us because we so desperately need it. Grace happens. That is its nature. We are loved simply because we are. We can not seek grace, but what we can do is to be ready for grace.

We can lovingly prepare ourselves for grace by loving ourselves. Love yourself as much as you can. You deserve your own love and admiration. I know this is hard for many of us. It is sometimes so hard for me. We have so many challenges in our lives. So many temptations, so many opportunities to stray from the path that we want to be on, the path that we need to be on. But know that no matter how bad it has been, no matter how many bad choices you have made, no matter how hard it is, it can be different. We don’t always have the strength to change everything for our selves, but believe that you are not alone and grace can happen.

When I entered that ordination committee interview this summer, I was not on the lookout for grace. I was scared, nervous and a bit defensive. But in being with those people there, in listening and talking, in trying to be who I am, I found a little grace. In hearing that tough question "What is grace?" I was not alone. My fear of not knowing the answer to his question dissipated; and humbly I told him that I just didn’t know. Grace happened and let me off the hook.

Our reading this morning from Annie Dillard offers a wonderful image of grace as the solar wind. All we have to do is to set the sail and let grace carry us away. Think about that. If we are just ready, present in our lives, in love with ourselves, we have the opportunity to be swept up by an infinite love that will cradle us in our time of need. We, people who are not as good as we can be. We, who are scared, lost, often hopeless in this world full of suffering, indifference, and struggle. We, who have lost, who fail to love and be loved. We, whom success has passed by, can be graced with love from the source of all.

Set your sail. Forgive yourself for what has passed. Forgive yourself for your mistakes. Realize that all of us have made mistakes, have dreams that have been dashed, have not always been true to our own hearts. But take heart that at any moment, we can receive great gifts: the love of another human being, a sense of primal awe in witnessing a new born child or an ancient forest, the feeling of warmth and fullness we receive when we do a nice thing for someone else for no good reason.

Set your sail. Open your eyes and ears and spirits to the life that surrounds us. The life of the fields and parks and forests, the life of our family and friends, our own precious life that we all sometimes take for granted.

Set your sail. Look into the mirror and see the man or woman that you are. Not as good as you can be, but certainly not as bad as you could be either. Embrace yourself as warmly and tenderly as you can and see that every day is an opportunity to learn and grow and heal and change, that every day is an opportunity to receive grace. We are human beings, difficult to understand and often hard to forgive. Grace is unearned love from the source of life itself. God , the endless mystery, an unfathomable, infinite being offers us unconditional love. When you are worn out, used up, out of good ideas, set your sail broadly and grace will find you. Amen.

PRAYER

Precious God, you are our refuge. We need your strength, your firm hand guiding us from the past to the present on the way to the unknown. May your grace shine on us and in us and through us in our trials and triumphs each day that we live. Amen.