by Preston Moore, Intern Minister

A sermon given December 26, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

A few years ago, a teenager named Tonya in my church in Oakland was diagnosed with a particularly dangerous form of leukemia that often led to death by internal bleeding.  The church held candlelight vigils and special prayer services.  Every worship service seemed to be about Tonya.  Congregants brought forth an outpouring of caring support for her family.  Her doctors eventually achieved remarkable success with her treatment, thanks to cutting-edge anti-cancer medicines based on therapeutic use of Vitamin A, of all things.  To most people at the church, Tonya’s recovery seemed to be a striking example of grace:  an unexpected gift that reversed something terrible.

Another dramatic example of such an unexpected gift came my way during seminary.  I started accepting substitute preaching jobs at area UU churches.  My first time out, two friends of mine, senior members of my home congregation, showed up where I was preaching—for moral support.  I really appreciated that—especially because they didn’t drive and had to call on another senior congregant to bring them.

We went to lunch together afterward—the two senior friends, their driver, and I.  My friends began to open up, telling me about some remarkable life experiences.  Their driver friend, Maria, sat by silently.  I asked if she would tell her story too.

Maria spoke with a German accent.  She said she was born in Vienna in 1925, to Jewish parents.  She was extremely shy, speaking to no one outside the family until she was eight. Maria took ballet lessons at the Vienna Opera House.  Occasionally the opera company gathered up a group of little girls to be angels in the opera performances.  Maria recalled how they put blond wigs on the children to make them look more angelic.

In 1938 the Nazis marched into Austria.  That November, they carried out the attacks known as “Kristallnacht”—the night of broken glass, when mobs smashed the windows of Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes.  Ninety Jewish males were beaten to death.  Not long after that, the Nazis took Maria’s grandmother and seven-year-old cousin Lisa away to the death camp at Dachau.  She never saw them again.

The family knew they had to do something quickly to react to these terrifying developments.  Out of the blue, a program came along called the Kindertransport, organized by the Quakers and others in England to save Jewish children from the Nazis.  Maria and her brother George had a chance to be evacuated to England by this Quaker mission of mercy.  Just before they left Vienna by train in the middle of the night, Maria and George laughed and joked.  They did headstands and handstands—anything to hide their fear.  Later Maria’s family was forced to flee, hiding in Hungary.  Eventually they made their way to New York.

When the Kindertransport got to England, Maria realized for the first time that she and George were being sent to different places, far apart.  She cried out to him not to leave her, but nothing could be done.  Sixty years later, she still remembered this parting as the hardest, loneliest moment of her life.

After the war, Maria joined her family in America, where they were making a new beginning.  But new beginnings never erased the sense of shame inflicted on her during the Nazi persecution, which came back whenever any reference was made to her Jewishness.  Maria nevertheless got a job, met the man she would marry, and started a family.  Her son Paul began playing the trumpet at the age of nine.  He was so in love with the trumpet that his father, a doctor, became angry at seeing so much effort poured into something he considered frivolous.  But Maria encouraged this love in Paul anyway.

Paul grew up to be a professional musician.  His particular interest turned out to be the intersection of jazz and that special Jewish music known as “klezmer.”  It has its roots in Eastern European Yiddish culture.  Klezmer musicians wandered from village to village, playing for weddings, synagogue dedications, religious festivals, and other events.

Paul’s life has brought Maria’s story full circle.  His fascination with klezmer jazz took him to Berlin, the center of Nazi persecution a generation ago.  Paul is a leader in the renaissance of Jewish culture that has been unfolding in Germany in recent years.  For him, this calling is not only a matter of music but also a matter of memory—keeping alive the memory of victims of the Holocaust, including his own great-grandmother.

Like Tonya’s story, Maria’s was easy to see as a manifestation of grace.  Out of the blue, a young girl is spared from genocide through the courageous actions of foreigners who see her as the mission of their religion.   Now her son is playing klezmer jazz in nightclubs where the Jewish ghetto used to stand.

Like Tonya’s and Maria’s experiences, the most important example of grace in my life started out looking like a catastrophe:  my divorce.  It was the most painful, stressful, and deeply saddening thing that had ever happened to me.  And there wasn’t a rescue squad to step in and fix my broken marriage.  I prayed and prayed that it could be saved, but it fell apart anyway.  Talking to God felt like a long distance phone call where the person on the other end of the line never says anything.

Later, though, after the wound of the divorce had started to heal, I came to see what had happened very differently.  The divorce was an awakening.  In my career I was totally on top of things, but spiritually I was sleepwalking—asleep to how I was relating to others, and especially to how I was relating to my wife.

Looking back on it, I could see that my wife and I had assigned away large parts of ourselves to each other, giving away the ones that felt inadequate and hanging onto those that made us feel effective.  It’s one thing to make a division of labor like “you take out the garbage, and I’ll feed the cat.”  It’s quite another to say, “you be competent out in the world for both of us, and I’ll hold the moral compass—for both of us.”

My wife realized this long before I did.  She also realized that things had gone way too far to be repaired.  But she couldn’t speak, because in our relationship, I was the one with the voice.  She was the silent partner.  So the pressure to do something just continued to build, and finally it erupted, suddenly and dramatically.  She left.

My immediate reaction to the breakup was that if she would end our marriage, she must not be the good person I had always thought her to be.  But eventually I was able to see again what I had always known about my wife—that she was a person who placed a high value on lifelong commitment; that she really did care about me, despite her own anger and frustration.  Eventually I saw that I had it backwards:  given that she was a good person, her need to end the marriage must have been very intense.

I think you can imagine how bad it felt to realize that someone I loved very much felt an urgent need to distance herself from me.  I hope you also can imagine, though, how wonderful it felt to realize what was being handed to me to reclaim at the same time.  Sleepwalking and being awakened by crashing into the furniture is pretty painful, but not nearly as painful and tragic as simply missing what it means to be spiritually alive.

This wake-up call was the greatest gift I have ever received.  I don’t have any confidence that I ever would have heard a call to ministry if the divorce had not come along.  I do have every confidence that heeding that call was the most important leap of faith I have ever taken.

This experience gave grace a very different meaning in my life.  There were no heroic Quakers or brilliant doctors in my story.  Instead, the instrument of grace was someone who threw a hand grenade onto the table, metaphorically speaking, and blew up our marriage.  I prayed for salvation, in the form of the repair of my marriage; I received salvation, but in the form of having my spiritual life handed back to me and being called to ministry.  I got a real-life demonstration of Martin Luther’s famous remark that sometimes God answers our prayers by refusing them.

The divorce also showed me that grace is not just about receiving unexpected gifts, but rather is also concerned with being an instrument of such gifts in the lives of others.  These two aspects of grace cannot be pulled apart.  They arise from the same experience.  To receive grace is to have a sharp awareness of the preciousness of a gift.  With that awareness comes a sense of responsibility—not the kind that is imposed as a burden, but rather the kind that is purely voluntary and gladly born.  This awareness is the first step toward being not merely a recipient of God’s grace but also an instrument of it.

Seeing human life in terms of being an instrument of grace enables each of us to answer the most fundamental question faced by humans:  “does my life matter?”  I don’t mean “matter” just to yourself and your family and friends, or just during your brief lifetime.  I mean mattering ultimately and universally, in a way that transcends time and space.  The hunger for an answer to this question is persistent in every human heart.

A profound affirmative answer to this question is found in an experience of grace.  There is a symphony playing everywhere in the universe, all the time.  The music of this symphony expresses the essential good nature of everything.  It welcomes every musician—human or otherwise—and above all is harmonious.  Every musician is able to play in a way that supports and enhances the sound of every other musician.

Every human being, as well as everything else in the universe, is playing in this symphony all the time.  The everything elses—trees, rocks, all of nature—just play.  They always play in tune.  They never miss a beat.  With one special section in this orchestra, though, the section called humanity, it’s different.  There are choices.  Each of us can sit in the orchestra playing by himself with earmuffs on, listening only to his own music playing in his own head.  Or we can open our ears wide and hear the symphony itself.  We can hear it so thoroughly that it becomes unclear whether we are playing the symphony or, instead, the symphony is playing us.

When our sense of isolation disappears, something liberating happens.  We leave behind the timidity of that time traveler in this morning’s reading from the book, Einstein’s Dreams, who lived in constant fear of acting out of sync with the Universe.  And we leave behind the egotism of that supposedly self-made individualist who lives somewhere inside most of us.  We leave all that behind . . . and just play.

My title for this symphony is grace.  When we tune in to it, we are transformed. And we know that our lives matter.  We know this because grace is God made real, made manifest in the lives of mortals.  We often say there is a spark of the divine in every one of us.  That spark holds the key to making our lives matter in an ultimate sense, but only when we choose to act, and in a very particular way: when we trust God, in the face of ultimate mystery; when we choose to play in a symphony for which there is no sheet music, a symphony that fades in and out of our hearing—not because the music is inconstant, but rather because our hearing is.

When we so act, the symphony is transformed, just as we are transformed.  And because the symphony called grace is God made real, God is transformed by our actions.  The radical theologian Dorothee Soelle has stated this in bold terms.  “At best,” she says, “what Protestant theology and preaching articulate in what they designate as ‘gospel’ can be summed up as follows.  God loves, protects, renews, and saves us.  One rarely hears that this process can be truly experienced only when such love, like every genuine love, is mutual.  That humans love, protect, renew, and save God sounds to most people like megalomania or even madness.  But the madness of this love is exactly what mystics live on.”

The Quakers who created the Kindertransport acted in this way.  They trusted God when there was no evidence of an impending gift of grace.  The Nazi wolf was at the door. The government of the United Kingdom was resistant.  A bill to evacuate Jewish children to the United States died in committee in the U.S. Congress.

And although it certainly didn’t seem that way to me at the time, I came to see that my wife acted that way too in ending our marriage.  She knew she had to leave.  She had to trust that everything would somehow get resolved, that everyone would come out of it intact.  There was no evidence that would happen.  She had to pray and trust God.

Tonya’s recovery from leukemia came about as a result of the same kind of trust.  To see that, we have to go back and pick up one remaining loose thread in Maria’s story—what happened to her brother George, from whom she was separated when the Kindertransport got to England.

Even though his papers had “victim of Nazi persecution” stamped on them, George wound up in an internment camp with other Germans living in England.  One of them was a Nobel prize-winning chemist.  Another one thought it would be worthwhile to start a kind of school in the internment camp, because so many young people were being held there.  So they did, and the prize-winning chemist began to lecture.

George attended, and learned a lot of chemistry.  He eventually went to Oxford, got advanced degrees in biochemistry, came to America, became a professor at M.I.T. George earned a reputation as one the world’s leading researchers in a fascinating specialty area:  . . . the therapeutic uses of Vitamin A to treat diseases.

The chemistry professor and the organizer of the school trusted God.  They kept playing, on faith, even when the symphony was very faint or couldn’t be heard at all. They had no way of knowing that half a century later and half a world away, a teenager would have leukemia and would have her life saved by therapies using Vitamin A, for which the way was paved by a kid in their class who got interested in biochemistry.

Now, the stories I have told you today turned out happily.  But what if Tonya had died?  What if Maria and George never made it out of Vienna on the Kindertransport?  Does the existence of grace depend on happy endings?  No.  In fact, it utterly depends on unhappy endings.  The unhappy ending of the story of prior unsuccessful efforts with leukemia research laid the foundation for the grace of Tonya’s recovery due to new treatments—but only because the researchers pressed on when there was no evidence that they would eventually succeed.  The unhappy ending of the story of Hitler’s rise to power laid the foundation for the grace of Maria and George’s escape—but only because the Quakers pressed on when things looked utterly bleak in 1938.  Grace depends only on trusting God, and trusting God depends only on waking up and tuning in.

Grace is waiting for us all the time.  Each of us gets to choose whether to acknowledge the gift—whether to hear the symphony and play as part of it instead of on his own.  Maria, Paul, and George faced big challenges in their lives.  They not only were the beneficiaries of grace but also somehow managed to become instruments of grace in the lives of others.  Tonya is away at college figuring out what great challenges to take on with the life that was handed back to her—how to be an instrument of grace.  And I’m here in this church, pursuing a calling in which no one would have expected to find me a few years ago.

I know I wouldn’t be here training to be a minister if it were not for experiences of grace, pure unearned gifts that enabled me to listen for the way I should pursue being an instrument of grace.  I don’t have testimony from Maria, George, and Paul that they acted out of an experience of grace or that they even use the word grace.  It doesn’t matter.  Their lives show me that they drew strength from experiences of the universe cooperating to move them in good directions, in the face of grave doubt that anything good would happen.

To play on under such adverse circumstances is a godly act.  This is the answer grace provides to that fundamental question, does my life matter.  A few notes from one musician, playing in isolation, ultimately don’t matter.  An afterlife in a heaven where the streets are paved with gold and everyone gets a harp to play forever doesn’t matter.  But to be given a symphony, in time and space, and then to choose to play as one instrument in it—altering forever yourself, the symphony, and even the God that gave you the symphony in the first place—that matters.  That makes a difference that can never be erased or forgotten.  If the word weren’t so misused and misunderstood, you could call it immortality.  Amen.