The Fourth Church Pulpit

SAY GRACE
November 22, 1992

John M. Buchanan

126 East Chestnut St. Chicago, IL 60611 2094
312-787-4570 John M. Buchanan, Pastor

Scripture: Luke 18:9-14, Colossians 1:11-20

“...may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks...”
Colossians 1:11,12 (NRSV)

We used to call it “saying grace,” an odd way to put it. What it meant was “say thank you.” Say gratitude.
Say the grace I was told and what I said without much variation was what I had been taught. “God is great, God
is good. Let us thank him for this food...” or when Dad was at work and we wanted to see how much
irreverence we could get away with... “Here’s the bread. Here’s the meat. Good God, let’s eat.” Elemental,
simple prayers of thanksgiving. There is a theological reason why it is called “saying grace”; namely there is
something more basic than whatever gratitude we happen to be feeling at mealtime — and it is the mystery and
givenness of creation, the gift of life itself, the miracle of our being. To acknowledge that, to stand or sit in awe
before it, to say thank you for that basic grace is very close to the purpose of religion.

It also provides moments of wonderful humanity. To our table years ago we had invited a Synod Executive
and his wife who we deeply admired and who was my friend and mentor until his death several years ago. Jim

Sala, too sick to be here, wrote the Charge to the Pastor for my Service of Installation as he had for every one of
my installations: this time David Donovan read it.

In any event Jim and Helen sat at our formica-top table for Sunday dinner,and I asked him to “say the grace”
. for us. We bowed our heads. Jim was bald on top — completely, although he had a fairly generous wreath of
hair around the perimeter. So, when he bowed his head at our table our three-year-old saw something she had
never seen before. “Daddy,” she exclaimed, “he has a hole in his head.” We laughed about it for years and the
incident itself became a metaphor for the blessing of his friendship.

Before it is anything else, religion is something akin to awe, praise, adoration, Frederick Buechner says
begins when poetry begins with a lump in your throat. The basic religious act is thanksgiving before the
enormous mystery of life, the unaccountable fact of our being.

. It accounts, I think, for the durability of the Thanksgiving holiday which, after all, is pretty tame and simple
compared to say the Fourth of July or Christmas. It is, someone noticed, the one holiday that has successfully
avoided much commercialization. People don’t buy special clothes for it. Homes are not decorated, at least

elaborately; there are few gifts. It is a time for gratitude for basic things, life itself, food to eat, friends, family, a
day to “say grace.”

New Testament scholar John Koenig says that praise and thanksgiving are a heartbeat within the New
Testament. He points out that there are two hundred occasions of our being urged by the New Testament to
give God thanks and praise, even when there don’t appear to be any reasons for being glad and grateful.

Over and over again Paul urges his readers to assume a basic posture of gratitude no matter what is
happening to them. It’s almost as if things will be better regardless of what’s happening if only you can express
gratitude. And in a way that’s right. To be grateful is to be more whole. Psychologists know that a basic stance
of gratitude toward other people and life in general — seeing the grace in every day, every person, every new
experience — is one component at least of emotional health..C. SLewis, who lived through some very dark
days as his beloved wife died of cancer said, “Praise seems to be inner health made audible.” [Reflections on
the Psalms, p. 80] I think we know that intuitively. It’s why we insist on teaching our little ones to say “thank
you” as soon as they are able to talk. We know that they need — not the givers of gifts, the providers of food
and shelter — but they, the children, for their own sakes, need to learn how to say grace.

Is there any situation more uncomfortable and awkward than to send a gift and not be thanked? It’s not that
you need the “thank you” particularly, but until it comes you're never sure that the gift arrived, that it was
received, never sure that your love or whatever it was you were sending in the form of the gift, was accepted,
understood, received. A “thank you” closes the loop of grace and it is not closed until itis done. A friend of
mine says that’s why she became a minister in mid-life. Twenty- five years before she had done the
unthinkable, the unpardonable - if not sin, then social faux pas. She enjoyed a large and elaborate wedding
with many, many gifts and never wrote thank you notes. With her proper and strict upbringing she carried the

burden of her guilt all her life and laughingly suggests that she resorted to theological seminary as a kind of
radical penance.

There is basic emotional and spiritual wholeness in the experience and expressions of gratitude, the

wholehearted and exuberant love for the world, our own lives. It is a good thing to say grace... in all
circumstances.

What Paul was getting at in all this cheerleading, all this urging people who, after all, were not in such
great circumstances, a tiny minority, often persecuted, hated, misunderstood, terrified by the determined
hostility of the authorities... What Paul was getting at, of course, is that amazing grace which transcends the

immediate situation — that incredible miracle that in Jesus Christ God loves us, and is with us, and.blesses us,
and will forever keep us safe.

When Christians say grace, it is for that as well.

In the portion of a letter to the Colossians, which we heard, the theme is introduced: “May you be prepared
to endure everything, giving thanks to the Father,”

And then shift, a hymn to Christ, which among other.things describes him as the firstborn of creation, the
one in whom all things were created; the one in whom all things hold together; the one in whom God is pleased
to dwell and through whom God is reconciled to all people. It’s expansive and soaring, what the scholars call

“High Christology” and you can almost hear it in Gregorian Chant with the smoke of the incense rising into the
mysterious darkness of the cathedral.

At the time, in addition to persecution from the authorities the Church was engaged in a fierce argument
- about what, if anything, Jesus Christ had to do with this world — this earth — these bodies of ours — this

- creation. This little hymn is important because it cuts to the heart of the question — the reason why we feel
basic gratitude.

The argument was with people called Gnostics. You may have heard of them. Some people still think like
the Gnostics. The Gnostics assumed that the material world was evil, that God could have nothing to do with
it. In fact, the Gnostics reasoned God could not have had anything to do with creation. Creation must have been
carried out by a lesser deity, one of God’s appointees, a kind of junior executive.

The Gnostics had a big problem with Jesus because he was so human, so earthy, so they tried to spiritualize
him and at all costs keep him distinct from the God of creation who picks up a ball of mud and makes human
beings, who fumes and fusses and laughs and rages and weeps and scolds and forgives and loves passionately
through the pages of Hebrew Scripture.

So in this hymn we hear the early church saying what it believed. “Saying grace.” The God of creation is
the same God who came among us in Jesus Christ. The God of the incarnation is also the God of the creation.
Something essential is lost when religion focuses only on this world, to be sure. But something equally
important is lost when faith focuses on sin, forgiveness and salvation and ignores the basic mystery of the
created order.

11/22/92 —2—

One of the first things the Bible says about God is that God created the world, stepped back and took a long
look at the creation and called it good. The word, Walter Brueggemann suggests, really means “lovely.” Now
that is a very important idea: the created order is good and lovely. It is important because religion has so often
come to the opposite conclusion, namely that creation is not good and not lovely, but rather dirty, to be
avoided, or to be ashamed of, to be repressed or overcome.

Think of how much human religion can be described by that sad litany. But the basic and radical Biblical
word is that creation is lovely: creation is grace and the first word-to be said about it is “thank you.”

It has been suggested by historians of culture that the environmental disaster in which we find ourselves is
a result of Western Christianity forgetting the basic goodness and loveliness of creation, the old argument with
Gnosticism, and focusing all its attention on sin, confession and redemption. Catholic theologian Matthew Fox
gets himself in a lot of trouble with the Vatican by saying things like that and by reminding us that 300 years
ago the church decided that science, the academic inquiring into the mysteries of creation, the world, nature,
the universe, was hostile to religion and should be kept at a distance and, when necessary, repressed. It seemed
to me heavily ironical that just a few weeks ago the church finally apologized for its condemnation of Galileo.

Isn’t it fascinating that science, which for centuries, including this one, we thought might be the enemy,
now speaks a word that sounds Biblical, a word I think is occasionally more faithful to the creation than the
word of religion. Lewis Thomas, President Emeritus of the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a physician and a

biologist, speaks about creation with deep reverence and when he says his grace sounds like an Old Testament
prophet.

“Human beings simply cannot go on as they now are going, exhausting the earth’s
resources, altering the composition of the earth’s atmosphere, depleting the
numbers and varieties of other species upon whose survival we, in the end,
depend. It is not simply wrong, it is a piece of stupidity on the grandest scale.”

And then, at the end of the book, this consummate man of science who never uses the word God turns
mystic, almost theological.

“One thing eludes me, always has and likely always will; if the earth is what I
think it is, an immense being, intact and coherent, does it have a mind? If it does,
what does it think?”

So science, if we listen carefully, will help us “say grace.”

And when rigid piety will not allow us to rejoice in the creation, or merely our busy life in this busy city _
embraced by steel and concrete — art, music, poetry can be counted on to speak with integrity and eloquence:

Van Gogh painting his brilliant sun flowers and vivid iris as he descended into the darkness of despair and
depression.

Every time we sing the favorite hymn, “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” we are singing Ludwig Van
Beethoven's personal affirmation of praise and gratitude for the gift of creation, as he descended into the silence
of deafness. “The Ode to Joy,” Beethoven “saying his grace.” -

Or e. &: cummings’ poetic explosion of grateful praise:

“i thank you God for most this amazing day:for the leaping,greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite
which is yes.”

11/22/92 3

_ Every autumn when the Pennsylvania mountains turned brilliant red and gold, the one who taught me how.
to say grace would send a copy of her favorite poem.

“O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide gray skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Lord, I do fear
Thous’t made the world too
beautiful this year."
[God’s World, Edna St. Vincent Millay]

- Matthew Fox says we ought to spend less time thinking about original sin and more time celebrating our
“original blessing.”

Fox says we ought to fall in love at least three times a day - with another person, with an animal, a tree or
flower and with a little Mozart.. Falling in love every day with Mozart, he advises, can keep you joyfully busy
for seven years. [See Creation Spirituality, p. 30]

So, say your grace. Open your eyes. Lift up your head and heart and give voice to your gratitude. Thank
someone today for being who he or she is. Thank them for being whatever they are for you. Facing a difficult
decision, surgery, a persistent problem with a relationship? Give St. Paul the benefit of the doubt. Start with
gratitude for your own resources, the skill of the doctor, the good things about the person with whom you are
having trouble and see if saying grace doesn’t transform it. Say your grace, quietly in worship, and in some new
act of responsibility for this wondrously fashioned and redeemed creation. _

Among other things Thanksgiving in our culture is the beginning of Christmas. Advent arrives next Sund:
and we will begin officially and liturgically with our somber purples and lovely music. But last evening the
lights went on up and down Michigan Avenue and yesterday the first Christmas carols were heard from the
Salvation Army trumpets and sometime this week we'll get out the Christmas albums and tapes and discs...

That used to bother me — that confusing mystery of celebrations, that premature and forced cheer. It
doesn’t bother me any more. It’s a good thing I have come to believe, in the middle of Thanksgiving, for the
bounty and goodness and loveliness of creation, to find ourselves drawn forward to that indescribable gift of
love and grace; to praise the God of creation who in Jesus Christ makes all things new, who promises to love us
and to be with us and from whom nothing, not even our own death, will separate us.

To begin — a whole season of thanksgiving, gratitude for creation, which moves gently but with the
inevitability of birth itself, to that loveliest of creation’s lovely mysteries — a child, our savior, our joy, our

peace.

Thanks be to God.

11/22/92 —4A—

The Fourth Church Pulpit

EVERYDAY HOLINESS

November 29, 1992

John M. Buchanan

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126 East Chestnut St. Chicago, IL 60611 2094
312-787-4570 John M. Buchanan, Pastor

Scripture Isaiah 2:1-5
Matthew 24:36-44

“Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what

day your Lord is coming.”
—Matthew 24:42 (NRSV}

. , 80 the earliest Christians did not observe his birth date. The
Roman Empire, on the other hand, went wild during the last week of the

celebration in Rome was a real, week-long party with games and races and gladiators and eating and drinking
and carousing. The Christians, who ordinarily tried to be as inconspicuous as possible because of the

government’s penchant for picking on them and persecuting them, were suddenly very visible. They were the
ones who wouldn’t play.

And so the Christians decided to celebrate the most important thing they could think of —_ the birth of Jesus
Christ — on the very day the week-long Roman Carnival began — “Christ Mass.”
they established a time to prepare for it, a “Winter Lent,”
think about the most basic and precious beliefs — that God so loved the world as to come among us, to live in
the world — incarnation. And, in order to do that properly, Advent was a somber and serious time; the
liturgical color they assigned to it was purple, the color of penitence and royalty, the same color as Lent. The
Advent texts they used in their worship point ahead to the fulfillment of creation, a time of judgment and of

hope. Their Advent music was gorgeous, but somber, and in a minor key. And they reasoned, after we have
prepared for four weeks, we will be teady to celebrate Christmas.

As the custom caught on
a period of reflection and penitence, an occasion to

and lamenting up and down the Avenue.

Itis a precarious day theologically and ecclesiastically. And it never arrives without a memory recurring
which has come to define for me the church’s theological and cultural quandary. I call it “the Day of the Parade

o

a pistol he held high and that was the signal for the parade to begin, for the band to start playing “Frosty the
Snowman” and to step off. It was very cold and it took a long time to get it all organized. I recall shivering,
wondering how I had gotten into this and profoundly hoping that there were no members of the theological
faculty of the University of Chicago in the crowd — who had talked a lot about Christianity and culture and not
allowing the Gospel to be assimilated into the values of the world. Finally, it began. The President of the
Chamber of Commerce welcomed everybody, the Mayor greeted the huge and shivering crowd, so did all the

dignitaries, the band played the “National Anthem,” and exactly on schedule, I approached the podium, parade
prayer in hand. Just as I said, “Let us pray,” the band director, carried away no doubt by the drama of the
moment, shot off his pistol, the flare rose high in the air, the drums rolled off, “Frosty the Snowman” began, the
parade started and I stood there... an unprayed parade prayer in my hand. It was a precarious day.

The trouble is, we can’t compete any more than the early church could compete with the Roman carnival.

We did compromise this year and put our outside wreaths and greens up a week early, but we're not ready to
sing our carols — not quite yet.

The reason is the same as it has been for twenty centuries. It takes some serious preparing to properly
celebrate the birth of God’s son.

It is so easy to miss, to trivialize, to romanticize, to sentimentalize and to misunderstand. In fact,
misunderstanding God’s relationship to the world is much of what the Bible is about.

Jesus’ people had been waiting for the Messiah, living in hopeful expectation for centuries. During the
worst of times — invasion, defeat, captivity, oppression, persecution — they held tightly to a precious hope
that God would come and make things right. A day of reckoning was coming, a day unlike any before when a
messianic hero would descend from the clouds and restore their fortunes. The Son of Man was what they
called this person: some said he would be the Messiah. Others said he would simply be the one to push the
enemies into the sea, punish those who were profiting by Israel's misery and establish Israel’s power and
autonomy and glory and pride. A lovely hope. Who wouldn’t hold it tightly?

Jesus used the vocabulary and some of the images of this apocalyptic vision, but consistently he seems to
have warned his followers that this way of thinking misses the point. Invested so thoroughly in the end of
things, the final days, it misses the holiness and beauty of these days. Expecting God’s final judgment at the
end of time, it misses God's love and peace and reconciliation — this time, this world, this place.

Thomas Moore, psychotherapist and author, formerly a member of a monastic order, has written a fine new
book, Care of the Soul, in which he observes:

“There are two ways of thinking about church and religion. One is that we go to
church in order to be in the presence of the holy and to have our lives influenced

by that presence. The other is that church teaches us directly and symbolically to
see the sacred dimension of everyday life." (p. 214]

Ht is Moore’s opinion that the good and true religion always shows us the holy in the everyday. His name
for it is “vernacular spirituality” and he observes that if the sacred is removed from life, our religion can
actually become an obstruction to what is sacred in life.

Fascinating thought — that when it focuses on the extraordinary religion actually prevents us from seeing
and hearing and experiencing what is authentically holy. It’s what Jesus was talking about when he addressed
his disciples to be watchful, lest they miss God’s coming into life. It is, [ believe, God’s word to us always — as
we begin this holy season — and it is the word we must say to one another and together to the world.

God’s coming into history in the birth of Mary of Nazareth’s baby is a sign that the world, history, life itself,

is the place where we can expect and anticipate the presence and power of God’s love. That is a common idea
— the most revolutionary religious idea anybody every thought.

11/29/92 —~2—

Sometimes it is a dangerous idea. Sometimes when Christian people start talking and acting as if they really
believe that the ordinary can become sacred, that the purpose of God’s activity is not what some cynically call
“pie in the sky bye and bye,” but a better life in the here and now; that God can be counted on to show up in

marketplace, courtroom, and jail cell } and not just the high altar of the cathedral. Sometimes those ideas sour
like trouble.

I had the privilege recently of a conversation with Protestant church leaders from Poland, Czechoslovakia
and Hungary, all of whom told us again that belonging to the church and affirming the faith was the one way
people could say “no” to the power of a totalitarian state; that church membership was always dangerous and
occasionally fatal; that to be identified with the Christian Church was to be banned from any position of
influence, from going to a university for instance. These brave people who lived with four decades of
oppression told us something people in this nation need to hear, namely that dictators always recognize the
power of a hope based on the theology of Advent — God’s coming Kingdom.

The word we must speak at Advent is about a better world coming, a world of peace and reconciliation and
justice; frankly it doesn’t have anything to do with the retail bonanza on Michigan Avenue. But it has
everything in the world to do with people who live a mile west of here, who do not have enough money to do
their Christmas shopping on Michigan Avenue and would not be particularly welcome even if they did. Our

word in Advent is that God can be counted on to be present in this world, particularly where and when the
world needs a little compassion and love and peace and fairness. _

The prophet Isaiah, centuries before the birth, saw the picture.

“They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks:

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more."

Advent is a time to recall that the God we believe and trust, is a God involved in beating swords into
plowshares, a God who is and will always be radically involved in the human situation. Advent is a time to
think about hope — not merely our eternal destiny, but real hope in a real world: hope for more plows and
fewer swords, hope for better schools and homes and hospitals, and fewer hand guns, AK-47s and UZIs.

Advent is about the power of that idea, that the God of the universe is on the side of peace and justice and
reconciliation. So God's people — regardless of the circumstances, living under Communist dictatorship, or

right-wing dictatorship, or in the gentle dictatorship of consumerism, or the dictatorship of poverty — are
people of radical hope.

One of my very favorite descriptions of God’s people during Advent is “people who are living on tiptoe —
living in expectation.” [see Halford Luccock, A Sprig of Holly, p. 46]

We understand the power of hope which expects God’s Kingdom to come into the world. We know that
one of the absolute prerequisites for progress politically is a strong hope which expresses itself in a refusal to

accept the status quo, whether the topic is world peace, the AIDS epidemic, or the warfare being waged on the
streets of our city by a population armed to the teeth.

The one final test of Christian faith, someone has said, is the ability to sustain hope in the face of what
seems like the impossible realities of modern life.

It’s not that we don’t like to play. It’s just that this news is so good and so profound that sometimes it seems
that the commercial Christmas simply trivializes it.

11/29/92 —3—

The word we have to share in Advent is finally — intensely personal. In The Search for Intelligent Life in
the Universe, which is being restaged, Trudy, the bag lady ventures into theology:

“One thing I have no worry about is whether God exists, But it has occurred to
me that God has Alzheimers and has forgotten that we exist."

It is the theological question asked by prophets, sages, poets, philosophers and common men and women in

every age since the beginning of time. Not so much, “Is there a God?” as, “Does it have anything to do with
me?”

And the word of Advent is that it does — it has everything in the world to do with you and me. The word
of Advent is that God comes into the everydayness of your life and mine, with healing to deal with our hurts:

that God comes with forgiveness for our guilt;
—that God comes and speaks a word to uneasy consciences;
——that God comes with reconciling love for our alienation, separation.

The word of Advent is that love, and forgiveness, and reconciliation are real, not simply in some celestial
paradise beyond time, but here and now: that God’s love is born in the midst of life’s ambiguity and complexity.

The Advent promise is of a kingdom which insists on appearing in the midst of life, not unlike a delicate
blossom pushing bravely up through the snow, ora surprising bright star on a dark night.

So watch for it, closely.

Watch in the days ahead for unexpected grace in your relationships; for almost unbelievable forgiveness for

your mistakes, your betrayals. Watch for love which surprises you with its vulnerability and humility; for joy
which refuses to be silent.

Watch for peace, unintimidated by violence. Watch for the gentle tugs of affection you will experience at

unexpected moments in the next few weeks and which will leave you unaccountably moved, with tears in your
eyes.

It’s Advent, everyday holiness.

tee ett

Dear God, in all the noise and busyness in the weeks ahead, may we hear again
the promise and the laughter and the singing of angels and the hope. Amen.

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